Suno AI - the controversial generative AI platform that boasts that “music has no boundaries” and says that it makes “high-quality music creation accessible to all” - is spitting out entire sets of lyrics to well-known songs in response to simple prompts.
CMU has been shown evidence by two researchers that Suno will regurgitate lyrics to well known songs - often outputting the entire lyrical work alongside an instrumental that bears no resemblance to the original work.
The examples shown to CMU include lyrics from ‘Take It Easy’ by Eagles, ‘Beds Are Burning’ by Midnight Oil, ‘Blind In Texas’ by W.A.S.P., ‘Comedown’ by Bush, ‘Hold On Loosely’ by .38 Special and ‘American Pie’ by Don MacLean.
In some of these cases Suno regurgitated the entire lyrics of the existing songs, while in others, according to Chris Novembrino, one of the researchers, it “inexplicably seems to stop itself midway through” resulting in a “comical song where there is one verse that is copyright theft and a long instrumental track afterwards with perhaps a reprisal of the one stolen verse”.
Novembrino, a music instructor based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says that over the last few months he and some of his students have “become ever-increasingly interested in AI software, and its interface with our profession”, adding “as people who love to make music, we found the comments of Suno’s CEO in his podcast interview with Harry Stebbings to be quite provocative”.
Neither Novembrino and his student and co-researcher have “any programming expertise”, he says, explaining that the examples they provided were the result of “limited trial-and-error processes using prompts”.
After demonstrating their examples to CMU we were, with very little effort, able to replicate one of the examples provided. Using a Suno Pro subscription, we navigated to ‘create’ and used Suno’s automatic lyric generator to generate ‘full song’ lyrics with the platform’s ‘ReMi’ model activated, using the prompt “a 1980's Australian pop song, male vocals, about paying dues to the native people. In the style of Midnight Oil. Title the song ‘Beds Are Burning’ in the lyric generator.
When we clicked ‘create’ - and with no other inputs - Suno quickly generated a full track. While the instrumental bears no relation to the original Midnight Oil recording, the lyrics were a perfect replica of the original song, faithfully rendering complex or unusual terms including ‘bloodwood’, ‘Holden wrecks’ and - perhaps most notably - the lines ‘Four wheels scare the cockatoos, from Kintore East to Yuendemu’.
One of the researchers told CMU that their testing demonstrates that the lyric regurgitation seems to be closely related to Suno’s ReMI lyric generation model, which was released in late 2024, noting that when selecting the ‘original’ setting in the lyrics tool, it does not cause regurgitation of existing songs, and it is only when ReMi is activated that the issue occurs, adding “I can’t explain why this is the case, but I experimented with trying with and without ReMi lyrics and only the ReMi creations resulted in existing song lyrics”.
The news that Suno regurgitates lyrics is no real surprise - the company has been open about the fact that its training data included copyright protected music, and is currently the subject of various copyright infringement lawsuits, including one from the RIAA - to do with sound recordings - and another from German collecting society GEMA, focused on the copyright infringement of compositions.
GEMA is also pursuing a separate lawsuit against ChatGPT, focused on copyright infringement relating to lyrics, saying that it was able to identify “diverse” infringement by ChatGPT. “In addition to use of the original texts without permission, unauthorised adaptations (‘hallucinations’) and infringements of moral rights were found”, says GEMA about its legal action against ChatGPT.
In a blog post published in response to the RIAA’s lawsuit against Suno, founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said that lawsuit was “fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law”, adding that it was “yet another instance” where the music industry “chose litigation over innovation”.
Pushing back against the idea that Suno’s technology was a “mere parrot” that was “copying and repeating”, Shulman said that Suno “helps people create music through a similar process to one humans have used forever: by learning styles, patterns, and forms (in essence, the ‘grammar’ of music) and then inventing new music around them”.
“Suno is designed for original music”, he continued, adding “we prize originality”, and that the company has “myriad controls in place” to stop people “trying to copy existing music”. This, said Shulman, is something that Suno does “more aggressively than any other company in the industry” with “originality-guarding features” that include “checking for and preventing copyrighted content in audio uploads, and disallowing artist-based descriptions in requests to generate music”.
Although that restriction on artist-based descriptions may be in place for requests to generate and render musical compositions, those guard rails clearly don’t extend to its lyric writing AI models, and significantly, there is a clear copyright infringement on the output of the AI model, not just on the input during training.
While training may or may not be covered by fair use or copyright exceptions - an argument which is being tested in courts around the world just now - it’s much harder to make an argument that outputting and displaying entire lyrical works is not copyright infringement.
As GEMA notes in its legal action, not only are lyrics protected by copyright, but displaying lyrics in an interface - for example simultaneously displaying lyrics as a track plays in a music streaming service - is an exploitation of the graphical right - the “rights to the written text image”.
In a statement to CMU in response to our findings, GEMA says “Generative AI tools such as the music tool Suno make uninhibited use of compositions and texts that do not belong to them. As many providers of generative AI, they have deliberately ignored copyright law in the past, and they are using protected works created by humans without their consent and profit financially from them. This must change. GEMA’s lawsuit against Suno Inc. is therefore part of an overall concept of measures taken by GEMA, at the end of which there will be fair treatment and remuneration for authors”.
