🔵Suno’s legal defence is woeful as the cracks start to show with GenAI

Investors getting cold feet, share prices tumbling… is the bubble about to burst?

Old, but surely the only applicable image for this article…

After the RIAA inevitably filed a suit against both generative AI music platforms Suno and Udio, I was certainly curious to see what kind of defence either might offer. After all, someone had already managed to almost perfectly recreate Mariah’s “All I Want For Christmas” such that any claim of it being coincidental would just look ridiculous.

Suno, therefore, has clearly decided that the best form of defence here is to attack… and boy, is it a lame attack. The platform claims that labels are “trying to leverage their exclusive rights under copyright law to strong-arm music users into categorically avoiding artificial intelligence products” whilst also admitting that it “is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case”. From where I’ve sat they’ve handed the RIAA such a massive stick to beat them with that, if nothing else, legal costs might be kept down as I’d imagine this could be over and done with as a court case in no time.

Frankly though, Suno’s defence here simply mirrors that of all generative AI companies at this point (well, the lion’s share anyway), in asserting that it actually has every right to train its models on whatever it can find on the internet because, well, it’s all fair game, right? It brings to mind that classic quote about Silicon Valley loathing copyright but having quite the love for patents. Oh, the irony.

The naivete at work here is stunning, but it feels like AI in general is now getting increasingly pushed into a space where it is having to fight to prove its value… and all signs are that the value aspect is really starting to slip.

One of the biggest problems AI has in general is that - not unlike cryptocurrency mining - it is horrifically power hungry. Consequently, the cost of delivering those nice answers back to you in Chat GPT et al is alarmingly high. To date that has all been propped up by VC money, but as consumers largely start to question the value of this all, those investors are getting worried. However alongside this, more and more businesses are getting savvy, enabling blockers and other means to quite clearly assert that no, their content is not up for grabs in an LLM-training free-for-all. As website 404 Media put it, “The backlash against AI scraping is real and measureable”.

The end result is AI struggling to find data to train on, costs spiralling out of control, and consumers looking increasingly ambivalent about this supposedly revolutionary offering.

In the midst of that then, Suno might well have a wider problem in the context of its lawsuit. Sentiment is shifting away from buying into the promise of AI, and with it, those irritating small details like copyright might well find more of a sympathetic ear.

In short? This likely won’t end well for Suno. Furthermore whilst I’ve speculated in the past that the likes of Universal might simply look to do a licensed deal here, I think the broader challenge might be that once the novelty has worn off creating X-rated comedy songs for YouTube, or weak recreations of popular hits, people will simply move on and Suno would struggle to retain an audience of sufficient scale anyway, given the huge operating costs.

If you’d like even more context on the way things are looking for AI right now, I strongly recommend reading this excellent post from Gary Marcus: “Five signs the GenAI honeymoon is over”. That says it all.

However I’d argue all of this ties into a more troubling bigger picture, which feels so bizarre that at points I’m starting to feel like a signed-up member of the tinfoil hat brigade. But no, this is all happening, and it warrants discussion, even in the context of the music industry.

More of that in my next update.

Have a great day,

D.

🎧 listening to “Initiation Ritual” by Pete SasQwax Beat Cult. Full disclosure: this is on a label I run with a friend as a little passion project of sorts. But this beat tape is not messing about, and no one put it better than this happy customer: “this record is made to be listened to in a single session, with good headphones on the couch or your car stereo cranked up to 11 doing 200 on the autobahn. From personal experience, both scenarios work differently, but each really well.” Available exclusively on Bandcamp and all at a nice price too. (Sensible Dad note: er, please drive safely folks!)

💸 shopping in Devil Records in Valencia. I’ll cop to the fact that I still get that buzz when you stumble on a random record shop chock full of great music, and it turns out Valencia has no shortage of great record shops. I loved this spot so much I even bought their t-shirt. I love Valencia as a city though, and still regret once turning down the opportunity to teach at Berklee campus based there. I’d re-think that now, no question.

📖 reading lots of Substack posts, both articles and notes in the Twitter-a-like social feature. It feels like the quality of writing is really getting amazing now - that or I’m simply discovering it all via shared posts in the Notes section. Either way, there’s some phenomenal writing going on, both about music in general, the industry as a whole, or wider topics like AI. Wonderful stuff.