The world’s biggest music company is now in the AI business. Last year, Universal Music Group (UMG), alongside labels including Warner Records and Sony Music Entertainment sued two AI music startups for allegedly using their recordings to train text-to-music models without permission.

But last month, UMG announced a deal with one of the defendants, Udio, to create an AI music platform. Their joint press release offered assurances that the label will commit to “do what’s right by [UMG’s] artists”. However, one advocacy group, the Music Artists Coalition, responded with the statement: “We’ve seen this before – everyone talks about ‘partnership’, but artists end up on the sidelines with scraps.”

The lawsuit is one of dozens across US courts. As artists, publishers and studios argue that the use of their material in AI training is copyright infringement, judges are struggling to reconcile copyright law with a technology that undermines the very concept of authorship. For many, this is as much a legal question as it is one of justice. In Andersen v Stability AI, one of the first class-action lawsuits over an AI image generator, artists allege that the use of their artwork to train AI models without credit, compensation or consent “violat[es] the rights of millions of artists”.

That creative workers bear the brunt of the AI boom is not in question – generative AI is already displacing creative labour. In January 2024, more than a third of illustrators who responded to a Society of Authors survey said they had lost income due to AI, and one study........

© The Guardian