Aug 3 (Reuters) - Country musician Tift Merritt's most

popular song on Spotify ( SPOT ), "Traveling Alone," is a ballad with

lyrics evoking solitude and the open road.

Prompted by Reuters to make "an Americana song in the style

of Tift Merritt," the artificial intelligence music website Udio

instantly generated "Holy Grounds," a ballad with lyrics about

"driving old backroads" while "watching the fields and skies

shift and sway."

Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, told

Reuters that the "imitation" Udio created "doesn't make the cut

for any album of mine."

"This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this

technology is not transformative at all," Merritt said. "It's

stealing."

Merritt, who is a longtime artists' rights advocate, isn't

the only musician sounding alarms. In April, she joined Billie

Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists

in an open letter warning that AI-generated music trained on

their recordings could "sabotage creativity" and sideline human

artists.

The big record labels are worried too. Sony Music,

Universal Music Group and Warner Music ( WMG ) sued

Udio and another music AI company called Suno in June, marking

the music industry's entrance into high-stakes copyright battles

over AI-generated content that are just starting to make their

way through the courts.

"Ingesting massive amounts of creative labor to imitate it

is not creative," said Merritt, an independent musician whose

first record label is now owned by UMG, but who said she is not

financially involved with the company. "That's stealing in order

to be competition and replace us."

Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending

their technology when asked for comment for this story. They

filed their initial responses in court on Thursday, denying any

copyright violations and arguing that the lawsuits were attempts

to stifle smaller competitors. They compared the labels'

protests to past industry concerns about synthesizers, drum

machines and other innovations replacing human musicians.

UNCHARTED GROUND

The companies, which have both attracted venture capital

funding, have said they bar users from creating songs explicitly

mimicking top artists. But the new lawsuits say Suno and Udio

can be prompted to reproduce elements of songs by Mariah Carey,

James Brown and others and to mimic voices of artists like ABBA

and Bruce Springsteen, showing that they misused the labels'

catalog of copyrighted recordings to train their systems.

Mitch Glazier, CEO of the music industry trade group the

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said that the

lawsuits "document shameless copying of troves of recordings in

order to flood the market with cheap imitations and drain away

listens and income from real human artists and songwriters."

"AI has great promise - but only if it's built on a sound,

responsible, licensed footing," Glazier said.

Asked for comment on the cases, Warner Music ( WMG ) referred

Reuters to the RIAA. Sony ( SONY ) and UMG did not respond.

The labels' claims echo allegations by novelists, news

outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright

lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's

Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are

still pending and in their early stages.

Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts,

including whether the law should make exceptions for AI's use of

copyrighted material to create something new. The record labels'

cases, which could take years to play out, also raise questions

unique to their subject matter - music.

The interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements

can make it harder to determine when parts of a copyrighted song

have been infringed compared to works like written text, said

Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright

analysis.

"Music has more factors than just the stream of words,"

McBrearty said. "It has pitch, and it has rhythm, and it has

harmonic context. It's a richer mix of different elements that

make it a little bit less straightforward."

Some claims in the AI copyright cases could hinge on

comparisons between an AI system's output and the material

allegedly misused to train it, requiring the kind of analysis

that has challenged judges and juries in cases about music.

In a 2018 decision that a dissenting judge called "a

dangerous precedent," Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a

case brought by Marvin Gaye's estate over the resemblance of

their hit "Blurred Lines" to Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." But

artists including Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have since fended

off similar complaints over their own songs.

Suno and Udio argued in very similar court filings that

their outputs do not infringe copyrights and said U.S. copyright

law protects sound recordings that "imitate or simulate" other

recorded music.

"Music copyright has always been a messy universe," said

Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at law firm Baker

Botts in New York who is tracking the new cases. And even

without that complication, Albert said fast-evolving AI

technology is creating new uncertainty at every level of

copyright law.

WHOSE FAIR USE?

The intricacies of music may matter less in the end if, as

many expect, the AI cases boil down to a "fair use" defense

against infringement claims - another area of U.S. copyright law

filled with open questions.

Fair use promotes freedom of expression by allowing the

unauthorized use of copyright-protected works under certain

circumstances, with courts often focusing on whether the new use

transforms the original works.

Defendants in AI copyright cases have argued that their

products make fair use of human creations, and that any court

ruling to the contrary would be disastrous for the potentially

multi-trillion-dollar AI industry.

Suno and Udio said in their answers to the labels' lawsuits

on Thursday that their use of existing recordings to help people

create new songs "is a quintessential 'fair use.'"

Fair use could make or break the cases, legal experts said,

but no court has yet ruled on the issue in the AI context.

Albert said that music-generating AI companies could have a

harder time proving fair use compared to chatbot makers, which

can summarize and synthesize text in ways that courts may be

more likely to consider transformative.

Imagine a student using AI to generate a report about the

U.S. Civil War that incorporates text from a novel on the

subject, she said, compared to someone asking AI to create new

music based on existing music.

The student example "certainly feels like a different

purpose than logging onto a music-generating tool and saying

'hey, I'd like to make a song that sounds like a top 10

artist,'" Albert said. "The purpose is pretty similar to what

the artist would have had in the first place."

A Supreme Court ruling on fair use last year could have an

outsized impact on music cases because it focused largely on

whether a new use has the same commercial purpose as the

original work. This argument is a key part of the Suno and Udio

complaints, which said that the companies use the labels' music

"for the ultimate purpose of poaching the listeners, fans, and

potential licensees of the sound recordings copied."

Merritt said she worries technology companies could try to

use AI to replace artists like her. If musicians' songs can be

extracted for free and used to imitate them, she said, the

economics are straightforward.

"Robots and AI do not get royalties," she said.