The music industry’s AI fight

Surely, you’ve heard Mariah Carey’s holiday smash hit, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” But have you heard about this other song? It’s also called “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and uh, it sounds a lot like Mariah Carey. We’re about to spend a long time litigating how that happened.

On this episode of The Vergecast, with the help of Switched on Pop’s Charlie Harding, we dig deep into the new lawsuit filed by the RIAA against two AI companies, Udio and Suno. Those two companies are alleged to have violated music industry copyrights by ingesting vast quantities of recorded songs in order to train their AI models. Copyright law is complicated, these fights against AI companies are everywhere, and there’s really no telling how this is all going to go. But there’s really no way to hear the AI sing “Jay-son De-RULO” and not know exactly where it came from.

After that, we talk about the upcoming phone releases from Samsung, Google, and Motorola and try to figure out if any of the AI features we’ll hear about will actually convince us to buy a new phone. We also talk about some big-deal speaker news, because this is the summer of the party speaker.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with the RIAA lawsuit:

And in the lightning round: