Jason Isbell Files Class Action Lawsuit Claiming Suno Coded AI to ‘Extract Musicians’ Identities’

Jason Isbell has filed a class action lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, alleging the platform violates musicians' rights of publicity by encoding their identities into the AI model. The lawsuit, filed on Monday and obtained by Billboard, claims Suno's system can generate songs, descriptions and artwork that "can conjure up a beloved musician's identity" by simply inputting the artist's name.

For example, typing Isbell's name into Suno produced an Americana song imitating his characteristic vocals and country twang. Isbell, along with Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery, blues singer Guy Forsyth and jazz saxophonist Ed Calle, filed the complaint, hoping to represent a class of all musicians whose names have been used as Suno prompts.

Suno claims its goal is to help people create new content, not imitate existing work, and employs filters to block artist name prompts. However, the lawsuit states these filters often fail and can be easily bypassed by inserting spaces between each letter of an artist's name.