When the buzzy music startup Suno first launched its AI-based music-creation tool a few months ago -- one that allows users to turn simple text prompts into highly-polished, professional songs -- I was one of the many users right away who had a field day with it. Among my early audio creations, for example, was a banger of a reggaeton track that I sent to BGR's editor-in-chief; appropriately, Suno titled it 'Suave CEO.
Because the startup not only fired back by acknowledging having trained its AI model on copyrighted music -- it argues that doing so was totally legal under fair-use doctrine, in addition to pointing to Taylor Swift in its defense. The Swift defense, as I understand it, is this: Suno comes right out and embraces the fight that it used copyrighted music to train its AI tool -- and users, in turn, are creating entirely new and non-infringing music with that tool.