- OpenAI is reportedly developing an AI music producer that makes songs from prompts
- Juilliard students are said to be helping annotate musical scores for the project
- The project could set up a rivalry with the likes of Suno and Udio, as well as legal battles with music labels and artists
OpenAI, the company behind AI tools including the Sora 2 video generator, is reportedly tuning up a new AI tool that will create music based on text and audio prompts.
According to a report from The Information, OpenAI is working with music students from the prestigious Juilliard School to annotate scores used to help build and train the model, though the school itself has stated that it's not involved with the project.
Should the unnamed and unconfirmed OpenAI project come to fruition, it would allow users to use words or a brief snippet of sound to create new instrumental accompaniments, such as a guitar track, to pair with a vocal recording, or to produce background music tailored to a specific mood, tempo, or visual.
OpenAI has experimented with AI music models before. The company created MuseNet in 2019, which could produce music matching different styles, but it was limited to tinny MIDI files. Jukebox, which appeared in 2020, produced full vocal tracks to go with the music it wrote, but it was fairly primitive compared to more recent endeavors by Suno and other AI music developers.
What OpenAI seems to be working on now would go well beyond those early forays and be more like what OpenAI's new Sora 2 model and the Sora app represent for AI-generated videos.
The supposed inclusion of Juilliard students in score annotation is an interesting touch, and suggests that OpenAI recognizes how, while it's not unusual for large language models to train on massive unstructured datasets, musical structure is notoriously difficult to teach that way.
Unlike text, where you can scrape billions of examples, music requires an understanding of harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and timing – not just what sounds good, but why. The students could be much better at teaching the AI to 'read' the music.
Battle of AI bands
OpenAI's music project seems like it would put OpenAI in direct competition with tools like Suno, Udio, Google’s Music Sandbox, and other AI music tools. There's been a lot of recent interest in such platforms as Suno, and others have lept ahead in sophistication. But that improvement is paired with lots of messiness.
Streaming platforms are already being swamped with AI-generated content, only some of which is labeled appropriately. Sometimes, those AI tracks are advertised as having been made by real people.
Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have already filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio over copyright theft. OpenAI’s entry into the space only makes the stakes higher, especially since OpenAI has its own legal baggage in the form of multiple ongoing disputes over the use of copyrighted content in model training. If it turns out this new music model was trained in part on commercial recordings, that could be another powder keg waiting to go off.
Nonetheless, the AI-generated music economy is growing faster than regulators and copyright owners can track. The people using these tools are hurtling toward a moment when half the music online might be AI-generated, but no one agrees who owns what.
And that’s why OpenAI’s move matters. It’s a bet that music, like text and images, can be made flexible and programmable. It’s a bet that users will want, and expect, to make music the same way they make Instagram filters or TikTok captions. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of human-made music, but it does mean we’ll need to decide just how valuable human-made music is to us.
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