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.
While Suno maintains 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.
In a statement to Pitchfork, a Suno spokesperson said, “We believe these claims are without merit and we intend to defend against them. Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name.”
Suno is currently being sued for copyright infringement by Sony and Universal Music Group (former plaintiff Warner Records dropped out of the lawsuit to sign an official partnership with the company).
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