Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge
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.
Finally, we do a lightning round. We talk about Verizon’s extremely goth new logo, Meta’s latest foray into the fediverse, this week’s Supreme Court decision about social media, and of course, some very important Cybertruck wiper news.
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:
What the RIAA lawsuits against Udio and Suno mean for AI and copyright
Major record labels sue AI company behind ‘BBL Drizzy’
From 404 Media: Listen to the AI-Generated Ripoff Songs That Got Udio and Suno Sued
Good 4 who? How music copyright has gone too far
From Rolling Stone: A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything
Charlie’s excellent podcast: Switched on Pop
And in gadget news:
Samsung just announced a date for its next Unpacked
Google announces surprise Pixel 9 hardware event in August
Motorola’s 2024 Razr phones are ready to make a splash
Beats Pill review: much easier to swallow this time
Ultimate Ears announces new Everboom speaker, Boom 4 with USB-C, and more
Ludacris Performs Free Concert With JBL Speaker: Here’s Where You Can Buy One for Summer
And in the lightning round:
Nilay Patel’s pick: Verizon’s new V logo arrives as the lines blur between 5G, Fios, and streaming
Nilay’s other pick: Supreme Court rules Biden administration’s communications with social media companies were not illegal coercion
Nilay’s other other pick: Tesla Cybertruck recalled again, this time over faulty wiper and trim
David Pierce’s pick: Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse
David’s other pick: ChatGPT’s Mac app is here, but its flirty advanced voice mode has been delayed
