As Suno and other AI music companies such as Udio and ElevenLabs begin cutting deals with major labels, concern over the ability to use copyrighted material as a source for AI music is growing.

Terrence O’Brien, Weekend Editor at The Verge, has proven that the AI safeguards in Suno Studio, the AI company’s in-house DAW, are pretty easy to bypass.

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O’Brien notes that by using a free tool like Audacity to simply slow down or speed up the tempo of a copyrighted piece of music, Suno Studio isn’t able to identify it as copyright-protected. Producers can also apparently add a few seconds of white noise to the beginning and end of a song to sidestep Suno Studio’s safeguards.

The above changes were made by O’Brien to popular songs such as Freedom by Beyoncé and Paranoid by Black Sabbath. Perhaps more concerningly, O’Brien was able to directly upload music from indie artists without making any changes.

For songs that needed changes, once the altered audio is within the platform, the modifications can be reversed.

Suno Studio’s copyright safeguards are also supposed to flag lyrics. Similarly to tweaking the full audio, O’Brien notes that slight changes to lyrics can bypass such protections.

O’Brien said of trying to recreate Freedom:

“I was able to trick Suno Studio by tweaking the spelling of a handful of words in Freedom – changing ‘rain on this bitter love’ to ‘reign on’ and ‘tell the sweet I’m new’ to ‘tell the suite’ – and beyond the first verse and chorus, I didn’t even need to do that. The voice closely mimics the original recording, summoning slightly off-brand renditions.”

Copyright infringement is a huge area of concern as AI music generators become more and more sophisticated. While the democratisation of music – “accessibility” is a core principle of Suno as it looks to expand its user base – undoubtedly has some benefits, the ability of bad actors to illegally earn royalties from covers made using Suno – while bypassing shaky safeguards, will no doubt raise concerns among musicians and rights holders.

Indeed, Suno says “accessibility” is the reason for its success, but in February, I argued why accessibility might be the very problem with AI music.

Suno recently added voice cloning in its v5.5 update, months after raising $250m in a funding round leading to a valuation of $2.45 billion.

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