Training AI music models is about to get very expensive [Video]

AI music is suddenly in a make-or-break moment. On June 24, Suno and Udio, two leading AI music startups that make tools to generate complete songs from a prompt in seconds, were sued by major record labels. Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group claim the companies made use of copyrighted music in their training data “at an almost unimaginable scale,” allowing the AI models to generate songs that “imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”

Two days later, the Financial Times reported that YouTube is pursuing a comparatively above-board approach. Rather than training AI music models on secret data sets, the company is reportedly offering unspecified lump sums to top record labels in exchange for licenses to use their catalogs for training. 

In response to the lawsuits, both Suno and Udio released statements mentioning efforts to ensure their models don’t imitate copyrighted works, but neither company has specified whether their training sets contain …