Watch your back, Taylor Swift. AI is coming for you.

For better or worse, AI-generated music is having its moment in the spotlight.

Services like Udio and Suno allow people with no musical talent whatsoever to produce professional sounding 'songs' on the fly, using nothing but their imaginations and a keyboard.  

It's stupidly easy. Just supply a brief description of the song you want it to generate (aka a prompt), and the chatbot does the rest — lyrics, vocals, instrumentation — in virtually any musical style you can think of. If you're feeling creative, you can also upload your own lyrics. The AI generates a snippet of the song almost instantly, and lets you pick different variations in the same style or apply different styles. A pop song becomes a hip hop song becomes heavy metal and then marimba. You can download the audio and video of the song; the service also generates visuals to accompany each one.

Will these AI tunesmiths replace human pop stars? Probably not. But they may put a lot of unfamous professional musicians out of work.

Udio love?

Udio is the New Kid on the AI Block; the beta version of the service debuted earlier this week. Already people are using it to create 30-second classics with titles like "I Hate You With All Your Heart," "You Spilt a Coffee on My Dog," and "You Sh*% Your Pants and It's OK." [1]

I asked Udio to compose a song about necrophilia in the style of Tom Waits. Here's what it came up with.

The sound was closer to Nick Cave than Tom Waits, and Udio's PG-rated AI brain cleaned up the grislier aspects of the concept, recasting the prompt description as "a song about the adventures of a night owl." But adding the title "Thrill of the Still" is <chef's kiss>. 

First thought: This stuff is kind of amazing.

Second thought: These guys are going to get their asses sued into oblivion by recording artists, whose work they clearly used to train the AI engine.

ICYMI: Grand Theft AI

In fact, the site says, straight up: "Friendly reminder: You many not refer to the name of a real artist in the song title." Gee, I wonder why.

In other ways, using Udio was pretty frustrating. The site was sluggish and unresponsive (probably because it's being swarmed at the moment by people like me). I had to try multiple times to generate cover art for my song — necessary for creating a video version — before I could get it to work. I tried to create another song, and all I got was an error message saying "Backend Processing Error." 

I then asked it to create a funky hip-hop song titled "Backend Processing Error." It took a few tries before producing something that was... less than amazing. I won't torture you with the music, but here are the visuals and the lyrics Udio produced. 

This song might have the Midas touch, but what it could really use is a Midas Muffler, amirite? [2]

Suno or later, love is gonna get ya 

Suno debuted about a year ago. I played with it a bit back then, uploading lyrics of a country song I had written (Garth Brooks watch your back) and it did a reasonable job creating 30-second snippets of something resembling music. Suno has evolved quite a bit since. 

When I logged on this time Suno suggested  I create "an uplifting bedroom pop song about finding love on a rainy day." I thought, ok, sure, I'll go with that. After "Thrill of the Still," I could use something a little less... necrotic. 

Less than a minute later, it had generated four 90-second versions of the song in a 'synth driven dreamy bedroom pop' style. Here's the first one:

Umm, Suno? Billie Eilish's lawyers would like a word. 

I tried using an existing song lyric as a prompt, offering no other instructions. I chose one from a lesser known Beatles song: "Lift up your hearts and sing me a song that was a hit before your mother was born."

Suno produced the following, a "soul Motown" composition titled "Let the Music Move You."

It's the Temptations meets the Chi-Lites, with a just a hint of Marvin Gaye.  

I told a musician friend of mine about Suno and he created a song using the following prompt: "An infectious acoustic pop song with power chords [titled] Orange Man Perp Walk."

If no one had told me this was AI (and I didn't listen too closely to the lyrics), I would have sworn this was a new song by Taylor. Hoo boy. I think the last thing any sane person wants to do is piss off the world's biggest star or her army of Swifties. And yet, here we are. [3]

The song remains awfully familiar

Listening to what these AI bots generate keeps bringing me back to those knockoff records they used to advertise on late night TV by "not the original artists, but an amazing recreation." Like this classic from The Soundalikes:

This is what these services seem to be, only exponentially more so. I am not sure what the market for this kind of music is, frankly. I can see how AI will replace a lot of professional musicians who create ambient music for use in corporate videos and the like — they're totally screwed. I am not sure that a knock-off Taylor/Billie bot will satisfy anyone's need to experience second-hand emotional angst. I don't see AI replacing original music written and performed by actual humans. But I've been wrong before.

My big prediction: Suno and Udio will eventually merge, get sued by record companies, and we'll end up with this: 

I'll show myself out.

Apologies for injecting Phil Collins into your brain. Can you ever forgive me? Let me know in the comments or email me: crankyolddan AT gmail DOT com.

[1] Yes, these are actual 'songs' listed on Udio's site.

[2] What the world really needs is an AI comedy generator. Or maybe not.

[3] To be clear, that is NOT the visual Suno appended to this music. Please don’t sue me.