Suno is a music copyright nightmareAI 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.
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.
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 of Ozzy or Beyoncé.
Indie artists might not even be afforded that level of protection. One of my own songs cleared the copyright filter while I was testing v5 of the company’s model. I was also able to get tracks by singer-songwriter Matt Wilson, Charles Bissell’s “Car Colors,” and experimental artist Claire Rousay by Suno’s copyright detection system without any changes at all. Artists on smaller labels or self-distributing through Bandcamp or services like DistroKid are most likely to slip through the cracks; DistroKid and CD Baby declined to comment.
The results of these AI covers fall firmly in the uncanny valley. The songs they’re covering are unmistakable: the riff from “Paranoid” remains identifiable and “Freedom” is obviously “Freedom” from the moment the marching snare hits kick in. But there is a lifelessness to them. Even if AI Ozzy is alarmingly accurate-sounding, it lacks nuance and dynamics, leading it to feel like an imitation of a human, rather than the real thing.
The instrumentals similarly discard any interesting artistic choices the originals make, or clone them in flat imitations. A non-jig “California Über Alles” cover has most of its rough edges sanded down so it sounds like a wedding band version of the original. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” goes from an experiment in doom disco to just vacuous dancefloor filler. And, while it kind of nails David Gilmour’s guitar tone, it does away with any sense of phrasing or progression, turning the solo into just a mindless stream of notes.
Creating unauthorized covers violates both the stated purpose of Suno, and the terms of service. Moreover, Suno only appears to scan tracks on upload; it doesn’t seem to recheck outputs for potential infringement, or rescan tracks before exporting them. The path to monetizing Suno-created covers is simple from there. AI slopmongers could upload them through a distribution service like DistroKid and profit from other people’s songs without paying the typical royalties a cover would give the original composer. And independent artists seem to be the most vulnerable.
Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered this recently when someone uploaded what seem to be AI covers of songs she posted on YouTube to her Spotify profile. (It’s not clear what system they were generated through.) Shortly afterwards, distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against her YouTube videos and began collecting royalties on them. And to highlight just how broken the whole system is, the songs which Vydia successfully filed copyright claims for are all in the public domain. Spotify eventually removed the AI covers, and Vydia has rescinded its copyright claims, but that only happened following a social media campaign by Campbell. Vydia says the two incidents are separate and it is not associated with the AI covers of Campbell’s work.
AI fakes are a problem for other artists too. Experimental composer William Basinski and indie rock group King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have had imitations slip through multiple filters and reach streaming platforms like Spotify. Sometimes, these fake songs can siphon up views straight from the artist’s own page. In a system where payouts can already be brutally low — Spotify requires a minimum of 1,000 streams to get paid — less famous musicians are hit hardest.
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system.
Services like Deezer, Qobuz, and Spotify have taken measures to combat spammy AI and impersonators. Spotify spokesperson Chris Macowski told The Verge that the company “takes protecting artists’ rights seriously, and approaches it from multiple angles. That includes safeguards to help prevent unauthorized content from being uploaded in the first place, along with systems that can identify duplicate or highly similar tracks. Those systems are backed by human review to make sure we’re getting it right.” But no system is perfect, and keeping up with a flood of AI slop enabled by platforms like Suno poses a challenge.
Macowski acknowledged the technical difficulties involved, saying, “It’s an area we’re continuing to invest in and evolve, especially as new technologies emerge.”
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system. But it’s one artists have particularly little recourse to fight. Bands can contact Spotify and have AI fakes removed from their profile. It’s harder to tell how those fakes are generated, and if they’re the result of Suno’s filters failing. And so far, Suno’s response is silence.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#Suno #music #copyright #nightmareAI,Entertainment,Music,Report,Tech
AI 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.
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.
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 of Ozzy or Beyoncé.
Indie artists might not even be afforded that level of protection. One of my own songs cleared the copyright filter while I was testing v5 of the company’s model. I was also able to get tracks by singer-songwriter Matt Wilson, Charles Bissell’s “Car Colors,” and experimental artist Claire Rousay by Suno’s copyright detection system without any changes at all. Artists on smaller labels or self-distributing through Bandcamp or services like DistroKid are most likely to slip through the cracks; DistroKid and CD Baby declined to comment.
The results of these AI covers fall firmly in the uncanny valley. The songs they’re covering are unmistakable: the riff from “Paranoid” remains identifiable and “Freedom” is obviously “Freedom” from the moment the marching snare hits kick in. But there is a lifelessness to them. Even if AI Ozzy is alarmingly accurate-sounding, it lacks nuance and dynamics, leading it to feel like an imitation of a human, rather than the real thing.
The instrumentals similarly discard any interesting artistic choices the originals make, or clone them in flat imitations. A non-jig “California Über Alles” cover has most of its rough edges sanded down so it sounds like a wedding band version of the original. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” goes from an experiment in doom disco to just vacuous dancefloor filler. And, while it kind of nails David Gilmour’s guitar tone, it does away with any sense of phrasing or progression, turning the solo into just a mindless stream of notes.
Creating unauthorized covers violates both the stated purpose of Suno, and the terms of service. Moreover, Suno only appears to scan tracks on upload; it doesn’t seem to recheck outputs for potential infringement, or rescan tracks before exporting them. The path to monetizing Suno-created covers is simple from there. AI slopmongers could upload them through a distribution service like DistroKid and profit from other people’s songs without paying the typical royalties a cover would give the original composer. And independent artists seem to be the most vulnerable.
Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered this recently when someone uploaded what seem to be AI covers of songs she posted on YouTube to her Spotify profile. (It’s not clear what system they were generated through.) Shortly afterwards, distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against her YouTube videos and began collecting royalties on them. And to highlight just how broken the whole system is, the songs which Vydia successfully filed copyright claims for are all in the public domain. Spotify eventually removed the AI covers, and Vydia has rescinded its copyright claims, but that only happened following a social media campaign by Campbell. Vydia says the two incidents are separate and it is not associated with the AI covers of Campbell’s work.
AI fakes are a problem for other artists too. Experimental composer William Basinski and indie rock group King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have had imitations slip through multiple filters and reach streaming platforms like Spotify. Sometimes, these fake songs can siphon up views straight from the artist’s own page. In a system where payouts can already be brutally low — Spotify requires a minimum of 1,000 streams to get paid — less famous musicians are hit hardest.
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system.
Services like Deezer, Qobuz, and Spotify have taken measures to combat spammy AI and impersonators. Spotify spokesperson Chris Macowski told The Verge that the company “takes protecting artists’ rights seriously, and approaches it from multiple angles. That includes safeguards to help prevent unauthorized content from being uploaded in the first place, along with systems that can identify duplicate or highly similar tracks. Those systems are backed by human review to make sure we’re getting it right.” But no system is perfect, and keeping up with a flood of AI slop enabled by platforms like Suno poses a challenge.
Macowski acknowledged the technical difficulties involved, saying, “It’s an area we’re continuing to invest in and evolve, especially as new technologies emerge.”
Suno is only one cog in a clearly broken system. But it’s one artists have particularly little recourse to fight. Bands can contact Spotify and have AI fakes removed from their profile. It’s harder to tell how those fakes are generated, and if they’re the result of Suno’s filters failing. And so far, Suno’s response is silence.
![New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing](https://i2.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/Mobile-Suit-Gundam-Wing-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing")
![New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/Mobile-Suit-Gundam-Wing-1280x853.jpg "New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing")
-SOURCE-Scott-Gilbertson.jpg)
Post Comment