Jason Isbell is leading a new class action lawsuit that accuses Suno of designing its AI music generator to evoke artists’ identifying characteristics.
The legal complaint, filed on Monday (Aug. 31) and obtained by Billboard, accuses Suno of violating artists’ so-called rights of publicity by encoding their entire musical personas as tokens in its AI model. According to the lawsuit, this allows Suno users to generate songs, descriptions and artwork that “can conjure up a beloved musician’s identity” by prompting the model with a musician’s name.
“Suno’s system recognizes ‘Jason Isbell’ as far more than a mere text string; it is a retrieval key for a set of performer-specific representations that it can use to generate a response associated with that musician,” reads the lawsuit. “From a name prompt alone, a user receives a multi-modal experience evoking that named musician. This includes access to a generated song like one the named musician might create, a description of the musician’s attributes and a related image. This is true for countless other musicians.”
As an example, the complaint says that typing Isbell’s name into Suno “produced an Americana song called ‘Paper Bell,’ imitating Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang.”
Isbell, who has previously made known his distaste for Suno, is leading the case alongside Camper Van Beethoven frontman and longtime artist rights advocate David Lowery, as well as blues singer Guy Forsyth and jazz saxophonist Ed Calle. The group hopes to eventually represent a class of all the musicians whose names have been accepted as Suno prompts.
Suno has publicly stated that its goal is to “help people create something new, not imitate someone else’s work.” To this end, the AI company says it employs filters that block users from prompting the model with specific artist names.
Related
But Monday’s lawsuit says this filter often does not work — and that even when it does, it’s “easily defeated by inserting a space between each letter of a name” of any artist. For example, it says that typing in “m i c h a e l j a c k s o n” into Suno produced a pop song called “‘Glovebox Moonwalk,” complete with an image of Michael Jackson’s signature white glove.
The lawsuit says Suno can also produce a Taylor Swift-style breakup song when prompted with “t a y l o r s w i f t” and a Spanish-language reggaeton urbano track in Bad Bunny’s style in response to the prompt “b a d b u n n y.”
“The platform is built to identify musicians by name and generate identity-evocative output on command,” reads the lawsuit. “This is its product.”
Isbell and the other artists allege Suno is violating their rights of publicity under various state statutes, including New York, California and Tennessee, which protect an individual’s ownership over their name, image and likeness. This is distinct from copyright law, which is the basis of ongoing litigation against Suno brought by the major record labels and other music rights holders.
The lawsuit makes a point to argue that because rights of publicity are separate from copyrights, artists own their own names despite record labels controlling certain musical assets. According to the complaint, that means artists have valid claims against Suno over name-specific prompting even if their labels have copyright licenses with the platform for sound recordings (Warner Music Group inked a license with Suno last fall, and BMG followed up with a similar deal last month).
Ultimately, the case seeks unspecified financial damages for the proposed class of artist plaintiffs, which it says could number in the “millions.” Suno did not immediately return a request for comment on the claims on Tuesday (Sept. 1).
