Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius (404media.co) 17
A hacker who breached Suno reportedly revealed source code and training-library details showing the AI music generator scraped millions of songs and lyrics from sources including YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, and podcast RSS feeds. "The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built," reports 404 Media. "Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs." Suno maintains that its models were trained on publicly available music files and metadata as fair use. 404 Media reports: The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this. The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from "genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged," and that "non-music will be filtered out." A file called "youtube_music" notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested "2,013,545 music clips." Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included "113,879 hours of youtube_music," "17,615 hours of genius_hq," "410 hours of free sound," "19,514 hours of imslp," "3,726 hours of jamendo," "62,117 hours of pond5_music," "12,287 hours of deezer," "152,162 hours of ytm_tagged," and "103 hours of musescore_lyrics." In total, this is at least decades worth of music.
Other code the hacker shared with 404 Media appeared to look specifically for vocals by searching specifically for acapella versions of songs on YouTube. The code also suggested that Suno was using proxies to scrape songs from YouTube through a company called Bright Data, which sells scraping tools, infrastructure, and data services. Additional code shows that with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five, 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts.
[...] The hacker, ellie.191, told 404 Media they breached the company by hacking an individual employee using the Shai-Hulud worm, a supply chain attack that allowed hackers to harvest GitHub and cloud service credentials. They said they also accessed Suno's customer list, which included customers' emails and/or phone numbers and Stripe payment details, depending on what they used to login. The hacker provided a sample of some of the customers, some of whom confirmed to 404 Media they had used their phone number to sign up for Suno and said they were never notified of a breach. The hacker told 404 Media they had no specific motivation for hacking Suno and said "I like to hack anything and everything."
Other code the hacker shared with 404 Media appeared to look specifically for vocals by searching specifically for acapella versions of songs on YouTube. The code also suggested that Suno was using proxies to scrape songs from YouTube through a company called Bright Data, which sells scraping tools, infrastructure, and data services. Additional code shows that with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five, 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts.
[...] The hacker, ellie.191, told 404 Media they breached the company by hacking an individual employee using the Shai-Hulud worm, a supply chain attack that allowed hackers to harvest GitHub and cloud service credentials. They said they also accessed Suno's customer list, which included customers' emails and/or phone numbers and Stripe payment details, depending on what they used to login. The hacker provided a sample of some of the customers, some of whom confirmed to 404 Media they had used their phone number to sign up for Suno and said they were never notified of a breach. The hacker told 404 Media they had no specific motivation for hacking Suno and said "I like to hack anything and everything."
SUNO - "Stealing Until Nothing's Original" (Score:3)
YouTube drummer El Estapario Siberiano came up with that and sells merch with that on it
Re: SUNO - "Stealing Until Nothing's Original" (Score:2)
Yeah, they're doing it wrong. They should have open sourced it. That's how you stick a fork in the music industry. (It's cooked.)
Shocking! (Score:4, Funny)
This is as shocking as putting your tongue on the terminals of a dead 9 volt battery.
I feel like the case.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It was lauded by the copyright office itself as a great example of transformative work. It's a neat subject to deep dive (about which there are numerous great journalistic investigations), in its numerous YT takedowns and restorations and legal battles. Even when the copyright office itself declares it valid, and legal battles establish it as valid, still AI use of material similarly is somehow sneered upon.
Re: (Score:2)
So, someone else can in turn legally scrape Sumo and sell the results on in the market?
Re: (Score:2)
You can. Unedited AI output is currently not protected. So if you scrape something post-processed by the artist you may run into trouble, but if you scrape the original suno song you're probably fine. Be careful, laws are subject to change.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Copyright infringement for commercial purposes (Score:2)
That comparison would work if you could listen to millions of songs then become capable of generating millions of songs on demand, within weeks or even months. The scale makes the difference. It's a bit like how you can buy a knife but not a nuke, even though in both cases you can use them to kill people. I think.
Re: Copyright infringement for commercial purposes (Score:3)
In fairness, YouTube's initial success is in part due to knowingly letting users illegally upload and share copyrighted content. They cannot be taken seriously in any claim they make here.
You wouldn't download an AI (Score:2)
“Good artists copy, great artists steal” - Pablo Picasso
I believe the classic line between copying and synthesis is taking from three artists or more.
Suno is quite impressive. (Score:2)
I'm getting into music production using an all-digital FOSS toolchain with only a Suno subscription and some second-hand Midi Controller hardware as the proprietary stuff. I use Suno as a source of inspiration and foundations for own tracks. What newest 5.5 model of Suno puts out, even in written and sung lyrics, is absolutely impressive. Media production is a field that's being turned on its head by generative AI and the most impressive case for that is about 80% of stuff Suno has put out for me in the las
Re: Suno is quite impressive. (Score:2)
If you want inspiration get into Eurorack.
And? (Score:3)
Every song written by humans was created with the influence of every song they ever listened to. No different than AI.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. But Suno, as much as its amazing, blatantly uses Billie Eillish's voice. Then again, for years, there have been mock Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin bands that try to sound just like Mick Jagger/Robert Plant.
No surprise SUNO scraped those sites, but ... (Score:3)
I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".
I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.
We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.
To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.
I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.