Amazon is blundering into an AI copyright nightmare

Suno wasn’t supposed to be an important part of Amazon’s Alexa Plus presentation. The AI song generation platform was a minor demonstration of how Alexa Plus could integrate into other apps, sandwiched between other announcements. But it caught my attention all the same — because whether Amazon realized it or not, the company blundered into a massive copyright fight.

Suno, for those of you not familiar, is an AI song generator: enter a text prompt (such as “a jazz, reggae, EDM pop song about my imagination”) and a song comes back. Like many generative AI companies, it is also being sued by all and sundry for ingesting copyrighted material. The parties in the suit — including major labels and the RIAA — don’t have a smoking gun, since they can’t directly peek at Suno’s training data. But they have managed to generate some suspiciously similar-sounding AI generated materials, mimicking (among others) “Johnny B. Goode,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and Jason Derulo’s habit of singing his own name. 

Suno essentially admits these songs were regurgitated from copyrighted source material, but it says such use was legal. “It is no secret that the tens of millions o …

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