Several major record companies are suing artificial intelligence (AI) song-generators Suno and Udio for copyright infringement.
Here are five quick hits about how we got here:
Who is suing?
Universal Music Group, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Atlantic Records Group, Arista Records, Rhino Entertainment, The All Blacks USA, Warner Music Limited and Warner Records.
They are suing the multi-million-dollar music generation services Suno AI and Udio AI.
On Monday, local time, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) released a statement on its website that the AI companies are each being sued separately for copyright infringement.
Record companies such as Sony Music Entertainment and Atlantic Records are responsible for several major artists including Celine Dion, AC/DC, Missy Elliott and Coldplay.
RIAA said in the statement the case against Suno AI was filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the case against Uncharted Labs, which is the developer for Udio AI, filed in the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Why are they suing?
The record companies allege that the AI song-generators have been exploiting the work of artists across multiple, genres, styles and eras.
In both cases, the record companies are seeking declarations from the AI song-generators that they infringed their copyrighted recordings, Suno AI and Udio AI won't use the copyrighted recordings in the future, and damages for the infringements that have already occurred.
When asked by RN Breakfast why Suno AI was being sued as it claims it doesn't allow users to reference specific artists and doesn't reuse pre-existing content, RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier said Suno AI was trying to confuse people.
"This is a lawsuit about the input. So they're being very clever. This is a lawsuit that says, you're not allowed to copy all of the music that's out there, and then mix it up in a blender and put out this new output.
"When they're saying, 'Well, we don't allow you to put in Adele's name into the prompt,' you can just put all of the descriptors and styles of her music," he said.
Mr Glazier said Suno AI is trying to hide the input they used and to "blur the issues".
How does an AI song-generator work?
The RIAA CEO said the song generator is generated with prompts where you can put in key words and links from pre-existing songs.
"You might have created [a] song on a service, by just saying, I've taken Adele's music from a YouTube link and I put the URL into the service and then I choose a voice clone model [for example] Freddie Mercury, it puts the two together and in about ten seconds out comes your song," Mr Glazier said.
Suno AI CEO Mikey Shulman said in statement, emailed to the Associated Press, that the technology is "designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorise and regurgitate pre-existing content" and it doesn't allow users to reference specific artists.
In a statement sent to ABC News, Udio AI said its mission was to empower artists to create "extraordinary music".
"The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no-one.
"Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas. We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set, and in fact, have implemented and continue to refine state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists' voices," the statement said.
Udio AI also referenced the song BBL Drizzy, where producers used AI to create the viral TikTok hit, and how that is one of many examples where AI can be useful.
What do artists think about this?
Many artists have made it clear AI can be used to sabotage the creativity of musicians.
In April, over 200 artists signed a letter which urged tech platforms to stop devaluing music.
The letter was published by the Artist Rights Alliance and included signatures from many famous artists including Billie Ellish, Chappell Roan, Pearl Jam and Jon Bon Jovi.
Part of the letter included a statement that said: "This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists' voice and likenesses, violate creators' rights and destroy the music ecosystem."
When asked by ABC'S RN Breakfast why it has taken until now for the record companies to go after these AI song-generators, Mr Glazier said they began by suing a service called Anthropic, which focuses on the publishing side of music.
"[Anthropic] was generating lyrics, they would scrape the internet and copy lyrics from songwriters."
Mr Glazier said they would mix up those lyrics to create new songs by using a predictive model.
He said this is the second case that focuses on the recorded music side, where the companies have collected evidence that showed when you listen to the songs generated by the AI song-generators, it was obvious they had copied hundreds of some of the biggest sound recordings in the world and then used those to generate new products.
"They copied them without permission, then copied them without attribution and they copied them without compensation."
"The lawsuit is very clear, you are not allowed to make the copy in the first place regardless of the output."
How is AI impacting the music industry?
Mr Glazier told RN Breakfast it can have a big impact on the music industry as no musical skills are required to make songs using artificial intelligence.
"Most of these AI platforms scrape the internet and copy recorded music from hundreds of artists to train their AI models," he said.
He added there are 50 AI companies that have been licensed by music companies.
Mr Glazier said, when used with the original creator's consent, AI can be used to assist them in many ways.
"I think the difference here is that companies want to use music without the creators' input and permission to make money from it, while using the creators' own work to compete against them and hurt them in the marketplace, which is just intolerable."
