Microsoft changes songwriting forever (for better or worse) as Copilot AI now can write you tunes

What you need to know

• Microsoft Copilot is an AI chatbot that originally launched as Bing Chat earlier this year.
• Copilot has steadily been receiving updates over the last few months and can even produce generative AI images from prompts thanks to being powered by DALL-E.
• Today, Microsoft announced it has partnered with Suno via a plugin to turn your ideas into songs.
• Microsoft states Suno will do all of the work even if you don't know how to sing, read music, or play instruments.

Today, Microsoft announced that it has partnered with US startup Suno, an audio AI specialist, to make song generation easier with Microsoft AI Copilot. All Copilot users need to do is toggle the Suno plugin from the Plugins tab and then this ability will be open to them. Microsoft explains that you don't have to worry about knowing anything about music in order to use this new feature.

"Through this partnership," the announcement reads, "people will have at their fingertips the ability, regardless of musical background, to create fun, clever, and personalized songs with a simple prompt. Suno has been a leader in AI music technology, pioneering the ability to generate complete songs—lyrics, instrumentals, and singing voices—from a single sentence."

"You don’t have to know how to sing, play an instrument, or read music to bring your musical ideas to life. Microsoft Copilot and Suno will do all the hard work for you, matching the song to cues in your prompt." 

After going to copilot.microsoft.com and toggling the Suno plugin on, all you have to do is type a song prompt into Copilot such as "make a rock song about a playful dog" and then it will generate a song for you. These generated songs are complete with lyrics, instruments, and vocals, but the generation process can take several minutes. Of course, users can also generate music directly from the Create tab on Suno's website.

It's currently unclear what sources Suno used to train its audio AI generator. 

Windows Central's take

Remember when there was an uproar over auto-tune in the 90s? Well, that's nothing compared to the potential thievery that is song generation via AI. Just like how AI image generators need to pull from a large database of images (often used without artists' permission), AI song generators must also pull from a library of instrumentals, voices, and lyrics in order to generate audio. 

This then means someone's work had to be fed into Suno's AI program and if the company is anything like the many other AI generator companies out there then it likely fed this data without getting consent from music artists. On top of that, this whole thing could violate the proposed No Fakes Act, which is currently being considered in the Senate with the intention of protecting artists including their "image, voice, and visual likeness" from being used with AI and Deepfakes. 

Depending on how proposed AI bills shake out, we could see a lot of changes to the way that AI chatbots and AI generators currently function. It wouldn't be surprising at all for this ability to be taken away or heavily nerfed on Copilot in the future.