Global leader in AI music generation platform Suno has recently found itself in an embarrassing public relations situation. What the company did not expect was that a candid comment from its own investor, C.C. Gong of Menlo Ventures, on social media inadvertently undermined the core defense position of the company in the copyright lawsuit.

Suno is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from the music industry. Record labels accuse it of using copyrighted music to train its models without authorization. In response, Suno's CEO Mikey Shulman insisted that the company's actions fall under "fair use" and emphasized that AI-generated content is "transformative," aiming to open up a new era of musical creativity and does not directly compete with original works by human artists.

However, investor C.C. Gong posted on X (formerly Twitter) that due to her frustration with Spotify's repetitive recommendation algorithms, she now "almost no longer uses Spotify" and instead fully immerses herself in personalized music created by Suno. She believes that AI can unlock endless "long-tail music" to meet extremely personal aesthetic needs.

Legal experts pointed out that this statement precisely hit a sensitive area of the "fair use" principle. One of the key criteria for determining legality is whether the new product causes substantial harm to the market of the original work. Gong's comments effectively admitted that AI music is replacing human-created works, directly refuting Suno's argument that it does not constitute competition. After this mistake was pointed out by copyright expert Ed Newton-Rex, the post was subsequently deleted.

Although a single social media post may not determine the final verdict, it undoubtedly provided a powerful attack point for the plaintiffs and revealed the true intentions behind the capital behind AI: one of the ultimate values of AI may be the complete replacement of traditional content industries.