This week two different stories hammered home the extent to which today’s generative AI startups have adopted a “move fast and break sh-t” approach and how this may come back to haunt them—and us.
The first story is that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents major music labels, including Sony, Warner Music, and Universal Music, filed copyright infringement lawsuits against two well-funded AI startups, Suno AI and Uncharted Labs, which both offer text-to-music genAI models. (Suno’s is eponymous, while Uncharted’s is called Udio.) The complaints in both suits contain a number of pretty damning examples in which the RIAA demonstrates that Suno and Udio can, when prompted with an artist’s name—or even just a simple description of the sort of vibe that artist is known for—and also given the lyrics to one of that artist’s songs, produce works that substantially overlap the original, copyrighted song in composition and rhythm.
Both companies have been evasive about what data they used to train their AI models. Unchartered has said that Udio is trained on “a large amount of publicly available and high-quality music” that was “obtained from the internet.” Suno CEO Mikey Shulman has said the company uses a “mixture of public and proprietary data” and, according to the RIAA’s complaint, told the association’s lawyers only that its training data was “confidential” while not denying the RIAA’s contention that it had hoovered up vast libraries of copyrighted songs. Shulman said in a statement issued in response to the RIAA suit that its AI model produced “transformative” works and noted that the company does not allow users to prompt the model with an artist’s name. (The RIAA showed that this guardrail was easily overcome by simply adding spaces between the letters in a name.) Shulman also said that rather than engaging in a “good faith discussion, [the record labels] have reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook.”
The problem for Shulman and his counterparts at Udio: That old lawyer-led playbook works. The RIAA has deep pockets and a strong track record of winning similar lawsuits against companies that also claimed that somehow copyright law didn’t apply to a novel technology. Remember, it was the RIAA that essentially drove Napster out of business in the early 2000s, and it eventually forced Spotify to strike a licensing and royalty deal for the music streamed across its platform. Those lawsuits essentially established the ground rules of a new technological age. These ones will likely help do the same for the genAI era.
While it is possible that a judge will rule that using copyrighted material to train an AI system is, as Suno and other AI companies such as OpenAI and Stability AI have contended, “fair use,” it is highly unlikely any court will rule that creating outputs that substantially plagiarize the original, copyrighted works does not constitute infringement.
The troubling thing is that it has been obvious to anyone who used Suno’s or Udio’s text-to-music generators that they were trained on copyrighted material and could generate infringing outputs. And yet the most prestigious venture capital firms and investors in Silicon Valley have chosen to reward this “better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” business culture by doling out huge amounts of money to these ethically challenged startups. In May, Suno announced a $125 million venture capital round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Founder Collective, Matrix, and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
The core ethical principle here is consent. It is a point that Neil Turkewitz, a former RIAA executive who has emerged as one of the most passionate voices railing against tech companies hoovering up data without permission to train AI models, has made repeatedly. If generative AI is the platform of the future, do we want it to be built on a foundation of theft and nonconsensual use? Or would we rather put consent at the heart of the business models on which the AI age is being constructed?
The other AI news item that caught my attention this week also revolves around consent. An investigation by Wired found that popular genAI search engine Perplexity was almost certainly violating its own pledge to respect publishers’ wishes to prevent AI companies from scraping their content for free. The code, called robots.txt, is a way of asking bots used by specific tech companies not to scrape the data found on the page. The protocol is voluntary—just a courtesy, really—not something legally binding. But the point is that Perplexity said it would abide by the standard, and then hasn’t. In fact, Wired caught it using an IP address to troll websites that it had not published as belonging to one of its web-scraping bots—which certainly makes it seem like Perplexity knows exactly what it is doing. Perplexity told Wired in a statement that the publication’s questions “reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the internet work,” but then it provided no further explanation of how, exactly, Perplexity does work.
This is in some ways even worse than what Suno and Udio have done. The AI music companies at least had the decency to stare awkwardly at their feet and mumble when confronted about taking copyrighted works without consent. Perplexity is looking us in the eye and saying, “of course, we won’t scrape your data (psych!).” Wired points out that summarizing news stories, which is what Perplexity does, is legally protected. (The story points out some other issues with Perplexity too, such as the fact its AI models sometimes summarize news stories incorrectly, and other times the summaries basically plagiarize the original work, which could be a copyright violation in some circumstances.) But I am more interested in the issue of ethics. And here, consent is key.
The corollary to Trukewtiz’s question is what happens if we don’t put consent at the heart of our data gathering practices? Well, what happens is that we all—as consumers or customers of this technology—become complicit. Silicon Valley’s louche ethics become ours.
