April 08, 2024
Source/Suno AI
Using the music-making platform Suno AI, we made a pop song about PhillyVoice.com. We were inspired by the Eagles making a tune using the service, which is the latest AI trend gaining steam.
The first half of the 2020s may be remembered as the crossroads when we all screwed around with early forms of artificial intelligence, mocked their creations mercilessly and then went back to doing the jobs we no longer have because they've since replaced us, or something along those lines.
The latest craze over silly AI surrounds the music-making platform Suno AI, which recently launched a refined version of its prompt-based song generator. The company uses its own model to make melodies and pairs them with OpenAI's ChatGPT to furnish lyrics and a title, unless you want to write your own. Some of the results are incredibly lifelike. Some people are having effortless fun making solar eclipse mixtapes, while others are exploring more seriously the implications of robot blues songs and removing skill from music.
"We are building a future where anyone can make great music," the company's website says. "No instrument needed, just imagination. From your mind to music."
Over the weekend, the Philadelphia Eagles got in on the fun and made an AI-generated country pop song called "Fly With the Birds." It's all about Eagles fans joining together in South Philly and not caring that nobody likes them, with a weirdly religious energy that could easily fit on an episode of "The Righteous Gemstones."
ngl this AI-generated Eagles song kinda hits, @suno_ai_ pic.twitter.com/TblatpqH6h
— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) April 6, 2024
Despite the team's happiness with the tune, most of the replies on X, formerly Twitter, came from Eagles fans who think it's awful.
This is the "Eagles last seven games of the 2023 season" of music
— Steve Silver (@SteveTSRA) April 6, 2024
But the song got us thinking about what Suno AI's model would do when asked to make a pop song for PhillyVoice.com.
Flew with the Birds, spirit soared right into a theme song for @thephillyvoice pic.twitter.com/UWxZiGhu6V
— Michael Tanenbaum (@m_tanenbaum23) April 8, 2024
Admittedly, it becomes easier to see why the Eagles liked their song after making one ourselves. This is catchy, and Suno AI even gave us a second version with a female vocalist that has the feel of a Kelly Clarkson song blasting from a Wawa gas pump. The whole vibe of this music is just one big, "Yeah!"
The sinister side of all of this is that — like other generative AI companies— Suno could be training its platform using stolen, copyrighted material. One of the company's key investors told Rolling Stone that the business was launched “with the full knowledge that music labels and publishers could sue." One article on Music Business Worldwide goes as far as to test Suno's various genre filters and point out how similar its tunes are to songs from well-known artists like ABBA, Ed Sheeran, Oasis and Blink-182. It opens up a thorny set of legal questions about musical originality that have already played out for decades with real people fighting in court over the nuances of chord progressions.
In the near term, Suno could disrupt the way advertising jingles are created and cut off professional opportunities for musicians already squeezed by the streaming era. It's hard to pretend this is something that anybody who respects musicians should welcome and support. The world would sorely miss the kind of marketing ingenuity and memorable tunes that define places like Quakertown Farmers Market, which functions like the region's bunker for the year 1993.
But this also raises another interesting philosophical question: Is it better for bad, cheesy music to be made by people or by robots imitating them?
