basketballmachine| The AI music era comes, several families are happy and several families are worried

At first it sounds likeBasketballmachineSimple Happiness (Simplicity's Delight) is like a catchy commercial pop song for Velveeta cheese. The singer sang "a piece of simple cheese" in the light guitar and cheerful percussion music. But listen carefully, you will find that the sound is a bit like computer synthesis, but it may only use Autotune (automatic tone adjustment). What really reveals that the singer may not be human is the second chorus, which mispronounces the word "tangy".

Now there is a new group of artificial intelligence startups focused on building automated music creation tools, and the above song was written by the software of one of the companies called Suno Inc. Enter short text instructions and Suno can produce fake vocal music in seconds, from dreamy electronic pop music about a lover's breakup to unplugged tunes extolling delicious fermented dairy products. It is reported that complete AI albums suspected to be produced by Suno have appeared on music platforms such as Spotify.

Production artificial intelligence has been used to produce text, images, films and other kinds of content. Music is becoming the next object, by which everyone is expected to express themselves through songs. But AI startups have also heightened musicians' concerns about their livelihoods, and soon the Internet may be flooded with half-baked computer-generated songs. It will also test the tolerance of record companies, which have long been unafraid to go to court with the technology industry.

Musicians and record companies have seen artificial intelligence as a potential existential threat. In April, hundreds of musicians and bands including Billie Eilish, Miranda Lambert and Aerosmith signed an open letter through the non-profit artists Rights Alliance (Artist Rights Alliance), urging AI developers, technology companies and others to stop using AI' to infringe and belittle musicians' rights.

Universal Music Group (UMG) recently reached an agreement with TikTok to step up protection against AI music after the company withdrew its songs from the platform for fear that TikTok would be "flooded with AI-generated music". Last year, Universal denounced a hit song that copied Drake and The Weeknd styles using AI. Dozens of music publishers have also sued OpenAI's rival Anthropic, accusing its chatbot of grabbing lyrics without permission.

In recent years, leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Alphabet's Google have demonstrated AI's ability to generate music, but so far they have not launched related products for consumers. For example, DeepMind, owned by Google, unveiled a music creation tool called Lyria in November, but has not yet released it to the public. The company said it was "in contact" with musicians and the music industry to promote "irresponsible development".

In this case, the current AI music revolution is mainly led by smaller companies. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Suno released music production software last year, and recently released a new version that allows users to produce songs up to two minutes long. Similarly, Udio, founded by former GoogleDeepMind researchers and engineers, launched a beta software last month that can output music clips of about 30 seconds.

"two or three years ago, this technology was not mature," said David Ding, co-founder and chief executive of Udio, who worked on DeepMind's production artificial intelligence projects, including Lyria. "now all aspects of research, including language modeling, image modeling, and film modeling, seem to indicate that the time has come for music models to shine."

Udio is supported by celebrities in the fields of technology and music. The company raised $10 million in seed round financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz, co-founder of Instagram, Mike Krieger, and musician willBasketballmachine.i.am and Common, music producer Tay Keith and publisher UnitedMasters participated. Suno did not disclose details of the financing.

In order to attract users, both companies currently offer free services: during the testing phase, Udio users can generate 1200 songs for free per month, Suno users can generate 10 songs a day, and paying members can get more rights such as song generation. The two companies execute each user instruction twice to produce a different version.

Andrew Sanchez, co-founder of Udio, said that in the first two weeks of launch, the number of trial users exceeded 600000, and users produced an average of 10 songs per second. (Suno does not provide comparable data. Udio's software is also iterating fast: several new features have been introduced in the past few weeks, including the ability to extend the song to 15 minutes.

Keenan Freyberg, co-founder of Suno, says people usually use Suno to write a song for friends or family (or together) before exploring other features of the software. Teachers use Suno to make songs to assist in classroom teaching, and Palantir Technologies Inc, a data software company, used it to create a country music for the recent software training camp.

Songs can be catchy, bizarre, or both. A song called "Mouse contraceptive Disco" satirizes a report in the New York Times (New York Times) that New York City uses birth control methods to stop the breeding of rats. Excerpt from the lyrics: "forget the rat poison, the trap is useless." Why don't we have a disco revolution and let the gadgets come on stage. "

"because we can't predict how people will use these tools, we feel like walking on thin ice." Freiberg said.

But as AI got deeper into the creative world, the technology began to conflict with the entertainment industry and its copyright lawyers. Companies such as Midjourney, OpenAI and Stability AI use datasets that contain images crawled from the Internet when building AI models that generate multimedia content. They argue that this practice is protected by the fair use principle of US copyright law, but it still leads to anger and litigation.

Pamela Samuelson, a digital rights expert and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says production artificial intelligence companies have a reasonable justification for using works as training data. But she believes that the way the court treats music may be different from works such as calculator program code, text or images. "the data type may be important," Samuelson said. "the court may make a distinction based on it."

Neither Suno nor Udio disclosed the specific training data of their respective AI systems. Ding said Udio uses public data from the Internet. Mikey Shulman, co-founder of Suno, said that to some extent, the company believes that training materials are even more important than how to build AI software, "so we will keep it strictly confidential." But Schulman said Suno's approach was "legal" and "basically consistent with the route of other companies"

"We feel like walking on thin ice because we can't predict how people will use these tools," said Keenan Freyberg, co-founder of Suno.

This confidentiality makes Ed Newton Rex, chief executive of Fairly Trained, a non-profit organization that provides certification for AI models trained with licensing data, uneasy. Newton Rex, who was in charge of Stability AI's music production products, found that using the software of both companies could easily produce a large number of works that were highly similar to copyrighted music. For example, he can produce songs that resemble bands and musicians like Queen, Abba, Oasis, Blink-182 and Eddard Ed Sheeran.

"We don't know what their training data is, but if it's copyrighted works and they use it to build products that compete with them, it's hard to believe that they really respect musicians," Newton-Rex said. Sanchez said his company is talking to industry stakeholders, including musicians and copyright holders, "to ensure that our technology benefits all musicians and creators." A record company official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were open to reaching an agreement with the responsible AI company.

Suno declined to comment on negotiations with the music industry, but Schulman said the company is considering how to compensate musicians and is closely watching the changing legal environment. "We very much want to deal with this problem in a way that is fair to everyone," he said.

To this end, Suno currently forbids the use of creative instructions that contain the names of musicians, and Udio replaces them with other descriptors. For example, when users ask for a "sentimental pop song in the style of Billie Alish" to describe the difficulty of choosing yogurt flavors at the grocery store, Udio replaces musicians' names with adjectives, such as "folk pop" and "independent pop". It will also add a blue "musician replaced" label to the repertoire.

Despite the concerns of musicians, these companies point out that it will not be long before a large group of people will be able to use at least some of the AI tools to create great music that sounds professional. "in the past, many people may have been excluded from music creation for economic reasons," Sanchez said. "We think this tool will remove their obstacles.'