According to Pitchfork.com, Jason Isbell and several other artists are suing the AI platform Suno for allegedly generating music based on their names without permission, reports The Wall Street Journal. The 400 Unit frontman filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Boston, alongside artists Guy Forsyth, Eduardo Calle and Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery. “Jason Isbell’s musical identity does not cease to be his property merely because sophisticated technology is involved,” the suit states. The defendants are seeking unspecified damages.
Suno states that it blocks artists’ names from being used as prompts, the suit alleges that those safeguards are easy to bypass by, for example, entering a name with spaces between each letter and uses a “distillation of the identifying attributes of the human beings who made the songs and recordings: the qualities that make a listener say ‘that is Jason Isbell.” Pitchfork has reached out to representatives of Isbell for comment.
The complaint also states: “Suno built and trained a model to index musicians by name,” the complaint said. “It encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit. Typing in a musician’s name creates a musician-based channel with a song, description, and graphic invoking the musician’s identity. Suno knows the commercial value of a machine that can conjure up a beloved musician’s identity simply by invoking their name. The company thus encourages its paid marketing partners to advertise this capability, without the consent of the musicians it invokes, while doing only enough to give Suno plausible deniability.”
Photo Credit: Owen Ela
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