Following a massive copyright lawsuit filed by Sony Music Entertainment, AI music generator Udio has vigorously denied scraping the label's catalog, explaining that its neural network simply arrived at the exact audio composition of Beyoncé's "Say My Name" through pure mathematical deduction.
Following a massive copyright lawsuit filed by Sony Music Entertainment, AI music generator Udio has vigorously denied scraping the label's catalog, explaining that its neural network simply arrived at the exact audio composition of Beyoncé's "Say My Name" through pure mathematical deduction.
The startup's legal filing argues that if a sufficiently advanced algorithm processes enough random white noise, it will eventually spit out the perfectly mastered, multi-track studio stems of Harry Styles’ "As It Was." Udio maintains that its model was never fed copyrighted MP3s, but rather ingested the fundamental laws of acoustics and independently conceptualised a 1956 RCA Victor recording session where Elvis Presley happened to be standing.
We didn't steal Sony's intellectual property, we simply built a system so robust that it calculated the most optimal sequence of frequencies in the universe happens to be the bridge to Single Ladies.
Sony executives remained wholly unpersuaded by the technological defense, noting in court documents that the AI not only recreated the exact vocal timbres of their artists, but also perfectly replicated the background coughing of a specific studio engineer from a 1973 Billy Joel session. Udio countered that the coughing was an organically generated audio artifact meant to simulate the human condition.
The startup's engineering team further defended the product's output as highly transformative. They noted that while their algorithm's mathematically derived version of "Hound Dog" is sonically identical to the original, it occasionally glitches to feature a terrifying extra thumb playing the bass, and frequently ends with a metallic voice screaming into a void.
At press time, Udio executives were celebrating a major funding round to help their upcoming video model independently deduce the exact visual frames of the 2002 film Spider-Man at scale.