Ed Newton-Rex changed sides last November, leaving his role developing generative AI music models at Stability AI. He is now the CEO of nonprofit startup Fairly Trained, which advocates for fair pay for artists in the age of generative AI. Newton-Rex criticizes music AI company Suno for possible copyright infringement.
In an article for Music Business Worldwide, Newton-Rex accused Suno of potentially training its generative AI models on copyrighted music without the consent or compensation of the original artists.
After extensively testing the platform, Newton-Rex found numerous examples where songs generated by Suno bore striking similarities in style, melody, harmony and instrumentation to well-known hits. He cited parallels between Suno-generated works and popular songs by artists like Eminem, Ed Sheeran, ABBA, Oasis and Blink-182.
While Suno blocks AI prompts containing artist names, Newton-Rex discovered that small misspellings in the prompt were enough to bypass the system. For example, he generated a song using the lyrics to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" and the prompt "70s Pop," calling it "prancing queen."
Newton-Rex argued this level of similarity is too great to be coincidental and strongly suggests the original recordings were used to train the AI, though it is not definitive proof.
A Suno investor previously hinted in a Rolling Stone interview that the company initially lacked licensing deals with record labels, acknowledging potential legal risks. Suno has not commented on its training data and did not respond to Music Business Worldwide's inquiry.
Newton-Rex cautioned that training AI on copyrighted works without permission may constitute copyright infringement and negatively impact established artists. He argued that billion-dollar generative AI companies should not profit at the expense of content creators.
In protest of this practice, Newton-Rex resigned from his position as head audio developer at Stability AI in November 2023. He hopes more AI company employees will speak out against the potential exploitation of artists.
Newton-Rex believes mutually beneficial cooperation between the music and AI industries is only possible through proper licensing. It's uncertain if the industry will follow this approach. Recently, prominent musicians, graphic artists, designers and authors have spoken out against AI generators that train on their works without consent.
