GoKawiilAI music platform Suno’s policy is that it does not permit the use of copyrighted material. You can upload your own tracks to remix or set your original lyrics to AI-generated music. But, it’s supposed to recognize and stop you from using other people’s songs and lyrics. Now, no system is perfect, but it turns out that Suno’s copyright filters are incredibly easy to fool.
With minimal effort and some free software, Suno will spit out AI-generated imitations of popular songs like Beyoncé‘s “Freedom,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that are alarmingly close to the original. Most people will likely be able to tell the difference, but some could be mistaken for alternate takes or B-sides at a casual listen. What’s more, it’s possible someone could monetize these uncanny valley covers by exporting them and uploading them to streaming services. Suno declined to comment for this story.
Making these covers requires using Suno Studio, available on the company’s $24-a-month Premier Plan. Rather than prompting a whole song with text, Suno Studio lets you upload a track to edit or cover. It’s likely to catch and reject a well-known hit with no tweaks. But using a basic free tool like Audacity to slow down a track to half-speed or speed it up to twice normal will often bypass the filter, and adding a burst of white noise to the start and end seems to basically guarantee success. You can restore the original speed and cut the white noise in Suno Studio, and the copyrighted song becomes the seed for new AI music.
A cover of Beyoncé’s Freedom generated using Suno.(opens a new window) A cover of Beyoncé’s Freedom generated using Suno.
If you generate a cover of the imported audio without any style transfers, Suno basically spits out the original instrumental arrangement with very minimal tweaks to the sound palette if you’re using model 4.5 or 4.5+. Model v5 is a bit more aggressive in taking liberties with the source material, adding chugging guitar and galloping piano to “Freedom” and turning the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles” into a fiddle-driven jig.
Suno lets you add vocals by generating lyrics or typing words into a box, and once again, it’s supposed to block anything copyrighted. If you copy and paste the official lyrics for a song from Genius, Suno will flag them and spit out gibberish vocals. But extremely minor changes can bypass this filter as well.
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