Country singer Tift Merritt’s most favorite music on Spotify,” Traveling Alone”, is a song with songs evoking quiet and the open road. The artificial intelligence ( AI ) music website Udio immediately created” 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 “does n’t make the cut for any record of mine”. This is a fantastic illustration of how revolutionary technologies is, according to Merritt. ” It’s stealing”.
Merritt, who is a long time artists ‘ rights advocate, is n’t the only musician sounding alarms. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and lots of other musicians in an open letter warning that AI-generated music trained on their audio could” damage imagination” and sideline individual performers. The major record companies are also concerned. In June, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music filed lawsuits against Suno and another audio AI company, launching the music industry’s entry into high-stakes patent fights over AI-generated content that are just beginning to enter court.
Suno and Udio filed their first actions on Thursday, denying rights violations.
The names ‘ claims echo allegations by novelists, media outlets, audio publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude that use conceptual AI to produce words. These claims are just beginning. The authorities are left to decide whether the rules may grant exceptions to AI’s use of copyrighted material to create anything new in both sets of circumstances.
The cases involving record names, which may take years to resolve, also raise issues specific to their field of study: music. According to Brian McBrearty, a composer who specializes in trademark evaluation, the interactions of melody, harmony, rhythm, and other elements may make it more difficult to determine whether a song’s parts were infringed on par with works like written words. According to Mc Brearty, “music has more variables than just the torrent of words.” ” It has ball, and it has pattern, and it has harmonic environment. It has a more diverse mix of various elements that makes it a little less straightforward.
Some claims in AI rights cases may be based on comparisons between an AI game’s result and the supposedly misled training material, necessitating the kind of evaluation that has controverted cases involving songs. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a case brought by Marvin Gaye’s house in a 2018 decision that a dissident judge compared to” a dangerous precedent” in a song” Blurred Lines” to Gaye’s” Got to Give It Up.” Since then, designers have resisted related complaints about their own music, including Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry.
According to Julie Albert, an intellectual property companion at Baker Botts in New York, rapidly evolving AI technology is creating novel questions for copyright laws.
