Country musician Tift Merritt’s most popular song on Spotify, “Traveling Alone,” is a ballad with lyrics evoking solitude and the open road. When prompted to make “an Americana song in the style of Tift Merritt,” the artificial intelligence (AI) music website Udio instantly generated “Holy Grounds,” a ballad with lyrics about “driving old back roads” while “watching the fields and skies shift and sway.”
Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, says the “imitation” Udio created “doesn’t make the cut for any album of mine.” “This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all,” Merritt said.”It’s stealing.”
Merritt, who is a long time artists’ rights advocate, isn’t the only musician sounding alarms. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists in an open letter warning that AI-generated music trained on their recordings could “sabotage creativity” and sideline human artists. The big record labels are worried too. Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music sued Udio and another music AI company called Suno in June, marking the music industry’s entrance into high-stakes copyright battles over AI-generated content that are just starting to make their way through the courts.
Suno and Udio filed their initial responses on Thursday, denying copyright violations.
The labels’ claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are in their early stages. Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI’s use of copyrighted material to create something new.
The record labels’ cases, which could take years to play out, also raise questions unique to their subject matter – music. The interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements can make it harder to determine when parts of a copyrighted song have been infringed compared to works like written text, said Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright analysis. “Music has more factors than just the stream of words,” Mc Brearty said. “It has pitch, and it has rhythm, and it has harmonic context. It’s a richer mix of different elements that make it a little bit less straight forward.”
Some claims in the AI copyright cases could hinge on comparisons between an AI system’s output and the material allegedly misused to train it, requiring the kind of analysis that has challenged courts in cases about music. In a 2018 decision that a dissenting judge called “a dangerous precedent,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a case brought by Marvin Gaye’s estate over the semblance of their hit “Blurred Lines” to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Artists like Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have since fended off similar complaints over their own songs.
Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at law firm Baker Botts in New York, says fast-evolving AI tech is creating new uncertainty at every level of copyright law.
Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, says the “imitation” Udio created “doesn’t make the cut for any album of mine.” “This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all,” Merritt said.”It’s stealing.”
Merritt, who is a long time artists’ rights advocate, isn’t the only musician sounding alarms. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists in an open letter warning that AI-generated music trained on their recordings could “sabotage creativity” and sideline human artists. The big record labels are worried too. Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music sued Udio and another music AI company called Suno in June, marking the music industry’s entrance into high-stakes copyright battles over AI-generated content that are just starting to make their way through the courts.
Suno and Udio filed their initial responses on Thursday, denying copyright violations.
The labels’ claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are in their early stages. Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI’s use of copyrighted material to create something new.
The record labels’ cases, which could take years to play out, also raise questions unique to their subject matter – music. The interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements can make it harder to determine when parts of a copyrighted song have been infringed compared to works like written text, said Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright analysis. “Music has more factors than just the stream of words,” Mc Brearty said. “It has pitch, and it has rhythm, and it has harmonic context. It’s a richer mix of different elements that make it a little bit less straight forward.”
Some claims in the AI copyright cases could hinge on comparisons between an AI system’s output and the material allegedly misused to train it, requiring the kind of analysis that has challenged courts in cases about music. In a 2018 decision that a dissenting judge called “a dangerous precedent,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a case brought by Marvin Gaye’s estate over the semblance of their hit “Blurred Lines” to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Artists like Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have since fended off similar complaints over their own songs.
Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at law firm Baker Botts in New York, says fast-evolving AI tech is creating new uncertainty at every level of copyright law.
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