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 projects a 21% revenue loss for audiovisual creators by 2028.
In response, a new wave of activism has united entertainment executives and artists to take on the tech industry with social media campaigns, crowdfunded lobbying, and lawsuits. The Human Artistry Campaign, an industry-artist coalition founded on the principle that “AI can never replace human expression and artistry”, rallies creatives and executives to jointly endorse legislation protecting artists from AI and big tech. But some artists, creators and civil liberties groups warn of another danger: big content.
What might the consequences be of well-intentioned working creatives taking the side of large media conglomerates that have long exploited their labour and aggressively expanded copyright against public interest? While some artists insist that an “enemy of my enemy” approach strategically justifies joining big content’s side, this won’t work if big content and big tech seem to be going from “enemies-to-lovers”.
Dave Hansen, copyright lawyer and executive director of the non-profit Authors Alliance, argues that copyright lawsuits won’t protect artists against AI. Instead, they’ll lead to exclusive licensing deals between large media and tech companies while “everybody else gets sort of left out in the cold”. History supports the cynics. When the tech and entertainment industries negotiated…
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