Stories

Is AI-generated music going viral next?

Musical ability: nature or nurture? Soon enough, it might not really matter.

Cristina Bunea
Cristina Bunea
February 1st, 2023
You’ve heard about AI writing articles, essays, and viral LinkedIn posts. But what about music? While the topic might strike a chord (pun intended) for technophiles, AI-generated music, like many of the other areas AI touches, can become litigious real quick.
A fun tool that generates Drake songs about anything in under a minute launched a couple of days ago. drayk.it uses GPT-3 to write the lyrics based on the prompt you give it. With the help of voice synthesis and “some music magic sauce,” it generated a song about launching on Product Hunt.
While ChatGPT and DALL-E were all the rage this past year, let’s not forget about OpenAI’s MuseNet from 2019. The deep neural network powered by GPT-2 generates 4-minute musical compositions with ten different instruments and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles.
Google’s been a player in the space, too. While we might’ve not heard much about Magenta Studio lately, last week the Google Research team published a paper on MusicLM. The model generates 24 kHz music from rich captions such as “The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds, like cymbal crashes or drum rolls.”
We’re about to see a lot of debate around IP laws. Who owns machine-generated music? Those who write the code and process the data? Those who write the prompts? As Robin Thicke would say, “I hate these blurred lines.”
Let’s discuss.
–
This article was first seen in Product Hunt's Daily Digest newsletter. Join over half a million other subscribers in being the first to read about the newest, trending products.