Google has developed a groundbreaking artificial intelligence system called MusicLM, capable of creating music in any genre from a simple text description. Despite its potential, the tech giant has chosen not to make the system publicly available, due to the ethical concerns surrounding its use.
MusicLM is not the first AI system to generate music, but it is the first to produce high-fidelity and intricate compositions. The system has been trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music, allowing it to produce songs that are meaningful and complex.
The system is also capable of building on existing melodies, whether they are sung, hummed, whistled, or played on an instrument. Furthermore, MusicLM can convert a series of sequential descriptions into a musical story or narrative. The system can be directed by a combination of a picture and caption or produce music that is "played" on a specific instrument in a particular style.
While MusicLM has the ability to synthesize vocals, the results are not yet perfect and contain distorted samples. The key issue for Google is the possibility of MusicLM using copyrighted material in the training data, leading to potential creative content misappropriation. In an experiment, the researchers found that 1% of the music produced by the system directly copied the songs it was trained on. This has led Google to be hesitant about releasing MusicLM in its current form.
This is not the first time AI-generated music has raised legal concerns. In 2020, Jay-Z's company filed a copyright complaint against Vocal Synthesis, after they used AI to produce Jay-Z renditions of songs like Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." The videos were initially taken down, but later put back online after YouTube deemed the takedown requests incomplete.
As AI technology continues to develop, it is crucial that the industry addresses the ethical and legal challenges surrounding AI-generated music, ensuring a fair balance between composers and users. It may still be some time before the usage of AI-generated music is fully understood in the eyes of the law.
Google's study on MusicLM, "Generating Music From Text," and AI-generated text-to-music samples can be found online. Despite the challenges, people continue to be impressed by the quality of AI-generated vocals, with one Twitter user commenting on the realism of the foreign language vocals produced by MusicLM.