As Billboard reports, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and various major labels are suing the Suno and Udio apps in a major copyright infringement case.

The major's legal argument appears to be that these AI apps have illegally trained their AI models on copyrighted material owned by the majors without any kind of legal agreement or compensation.

The initial response by the CEO of Suno (reported in the Billboard article) has been rather evasive, ignoring copyright problems and instead focusing on the AI service's supposed "originality". It is unclear if such an argument will hold up in court, since these generative AI models are almost certainly including copyrighted material owned by the majors in their training data. There is also already a precedent of successful data-licensing deals between AI companies like Open AI and various publishers for the use of copyrighted material as training data.

In either case, it will be interesting to watch the development of this likely precedent-setting lawsuit. If the AI apps are ultimately forced to pay a majority of their revenue to rights holders like Spotify, is unlikely they will be profitable in the long term — casting an uncertain future over these kind of generative AI music apps, which are already a relatively niche endeavour with considerable less funding than AI models for text and video generation.  Regardless of whether you are for or against the use of generative AI in music, the outcome of this case is likely to be significant.

You can read more about the case over at Billboard.