In an interesting turn of events, the text of the MIT License, a permissive software license frequently used in open source projects, has been transformed into a viral “sad girl” piano ballad. The transformation was made possible by AI tools like Suno.ai, which can convert any series of words into song lyrics.
The AI-generated song was created with the prompt “sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License,” and was tweeted by prompt engineer Riley Goodside. The song quickly gained popularity in the online AI community.
Suno.ai, formed in 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the brainchild of Michael Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg, who formerly worked at companies like Meta and TikTok. Suno has already attracted big-name partners, such as Microsoft, which announced the integration of an earlier version of the Suno engine into Bing Chat last December.
The company’s model can create temporally coherent two-minute songs in many different genres. However, some experts believe that the music generation model has likely been trained on recordings of copyrighted music without license or artist permission.
The song’s popularity has sparked discussions about the ownership of AI-generated songs. Suno’s FAQ states that music generated using its free tier remains owned by Suno and can only be used for non-commercial purposes. Paying subscribers reportedly own generated songs “while subscribed to Pro or Premier,” subject to Suno’s terms of service.
Read more at: arstechnica.com