oogle has released an upgraded AI tool that could be one of the next trends for making your text messages a lot more entertaining. While the tool won’t make you the next Taylor Swift, it raises copyright red flags that are unavoidable when bringing AI into creativity.

On Wednesday, Google announced Lyria 3, its latest tool for using AI prompts to create music tracks. These are 30-second songs that are meant to be used for creating short, customized ditties to send to your friends and loved ones for fun — not to make professional music.

Google gave the technology several upgrades aimed at making it much better to use:

• In addition to text prompts, you can now upload images and video clips to use for making the songs and for the cover art.
• You previously had to provide the lyrics, but the tool will now create lyrics for you.
• You can now choose musical genre, vocal styles, and emotional mood.
• The audio quality has increased from 16-bit / 44.1kHz to 24-bit / 48kHz
• The average time to create a song has decreased from 15–30 seconds to 5-10 seconds.

I used it to quickly make a 30-second track in K-Pop style celebrating the relaunch of our podcast, The Deep View: Conversations. It's far from an instant classic, but it would certainly provide a quick laugh if I sent it around to our team in Slack or a group text.

Of course, the elephant in the room is copyright and borrowing from commercial artists without their permission. In its statement announcing Lyria 3, Google acknowledged, "Music generation with Lyria 3 is designed for original expression, not for mimicking existing artists. If your prompt names a specific artist, Gemini will take this as broad creative inspiration and create a track that shares a similar style or mood. We also have filters in place to check outputs against existing content. We recognize that our approach might not be foolproof, so you can report content that may violate your rights or the rights of others."

Lyria 3 is rolling out on desktop first for users 18 and over in English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese. It will roll out on the mobile app over the next week and to additional languages soon.

Our Deeper View

The customizability of tools like Lyria 3 is what can make them super fun. You can now make a custom song with unique album art in less than 30 seconds using just a prompt and a photo. I'm sure this is going to be a lot of fun for people to make their loved ones feel special and punctuate important life moments — and create another avenue for consumers to bring AI into their daily lives. We also can't deny the uncomfortable truth that popular commercial artists are going to be mimicked in technologies like this, without their permission and without compensation. If Lyria 3 gets popular, then it will add another layer to the ongoing fight that is quite literally tearing the music industry apart at the seams.