Reported Google AI bot will be able to make music from text prompts

With AI slowly creeping into every facet of our digital lives — from writing essays to talking to therapists to creating original works of art — it’s least surprising that artificial intelligence would make a move into music, too. It’s also not surprising that tech giant Google would be the first big player on the scene.

The company is reportedly building an AI bot that can create “original” music(Opens in a new window) from both text and sound prompts — users could reportedly enter increasingly specific prompts that notate genres and styles, or even create songs based on a hummed or whistled melody. The future app is internally called MusicLM.

The information was revealed in a research paper(Opens in a new window) released on January 26 and describes MusicLM as a “model that generates high-fidelity music from textual descriptions” that “generates music at 24 kHz that remains constant for several minutes.” The paper explains that songs can be created from richly written subtitles, such as:

The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It’s fast and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds like cymbal hits or drum rolls.

Additional sequences of timed lyric prompts help build the song structure(Opens in a new window)along with a library of sounds and other AI prompts generated from sources such as art archives.

Examples of the AI-generated songs have already been published on Google’s Github account.(Opens in a new window) Part of a preliminary release of a dataset of 5,500 pairs of music lyrics known as MusicCaps.

The unveiling of such a platform will inevitably spark additional conversations about the role of artificial intelligence in intellectual property theft and copyright infringement by a variety of artists and art archives who have not consented(Opens in a new window) to publicly use their art in creating AI bots like these – while others are benefiting from the rise of AI technology. Additional AI developments also pose unique risks for the people behind the technology, as an exploited workforce faces the brunt of data mining and moderation.

Currently, the Google AI Music Maker isn’t releasing anytime soon, with the company explaining ongoing concerns about cultural bugs, disruption, and plagiarism concerns that need to be resolved before its launch.