Jason Isbell Claims Suno Used Artists’ Identities to Train AI ‘Without Consent’ in New Lawsuit

Jason Isbell and several other musicians have filed a lawsuit against Suno , accusing the AI music giant of training its models on the identities of popular artists.

While Suno and other AI companies have faced ( and in some cases settled ) litigation over their alleged use of copyrighted music to train their models, this lawsuit centers on alleged violations of right-of-publicity laws. Filed in Massachusetts federal court and obtained by Rolling Stone , the lawsuit claims that Suno “encoded” the identities of countless artists into its AI model “without consent, and now exploits those identities” for its own “considerable commercial benefit.”

To back up its claims, the lawsuit is filled with alleged examples of how typing an artist’s name into Suno can generate songs, descriptions, and graphics that evoke the real artist’s identity. The suit also suggests that supposed guardrails meant to deter this kind of prompting are easy to skirt.

“Suno knows the commercial value of a machine that can conjure up a beloved musician’s identity simply by invoking their name,” the lawsuit reads, adding: “Many musicians sell their rights to specific recordings. However, the identity right belongs to the performer regardless of who owns any copyright in an underlying recording unless the identity right is separately licensed, typically for merchandise under the artist’s control. This lawsuit seeks to recover the value of those misappropriated identities and to stop their ongoing commercial exploitation.”

The suit’s claims rest on the allegation that Suno took the identifying attributes of particular musicians and turned them into “tokens,” which could then be used to generate sound and descriptions reminiscent of the artist’s actual work. For instance, prompting Suno with “Jason Isbell” allegedly “produced an Americana song called ‘Paper Bell,’ imitating Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang. Suno described it as ‘contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar’ and provided an image of a paper bell with a church and trees in the background, evoking a country scene.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

(As of publication, “Paper Bell,” as well as many of the other AI songs generated for the lawsuit, are still available on Suno.)

The lawsuit also includes alleged examples describing what happened when other notable artists were used as prompts.