TikTok is testing an ‘AI Song’ tool that uses a large language model for lyric generation

TikTok is testing a feature currently called ‘AI Song’ on its platform that uses a large language model to power lyric generation prompted by text inputs.

the new tool was spotted by users on the ByteDance-owned social media platform over the past week.

The tool doesn’t generate music, but rather lyrics, using an LLM called BLOOM, which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model.

According to the research paper from BigScience introducing BLOOM in November 2022, the LLM is a “176 billion parameter language model trained on 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages”.

BigScience is described as “an open science project composed of hundreds of researchers around the world”.

The paper adds that BLOOM “was developed and released by a collaboration of hundreds of researchers” and that “the compute for training BLOOM was provided through a French public grant from GENCI and IDRIS, leveraging IDRIS’ Jean Zay supercomputer“.

The dataset used to train BLOOM is called the ROOTS Corpus, described in a research paper from BigScience as a 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset.

BigScience says in that paper that one of its “founding goals” was to train an “open-access, massively multilingual LLM, comparable in scale” to OpenAI’s GPT-3 – “yet trained on a better documented and more representative multilingual dataset”.

TikTok’s latest test follows the platform’s launch last year of a free-to-use music production app called Ripple. The app has two key features: a ‘Melody to Song’ generator and a virtual recording studio.

The Melody to Song feature launched last year as part of Ripple lets users sing or hum a melody directly into the app, and Ripple will then expand the melody by generating an instrumental accompaniment in a variety of different genres.

According to ByteDance, the AI model was trained on music licensed to or owned by the company.

ByteDance said at the time that “We are committed to respecting both the rights of our artist and rightsholder partners and those of our creator users, while protecting their works from abuse on our platforms”.

Additionally, according to a report in 2022 from news site Tech Planet, ByteDance had also recently launched a music creation app in China called ‘Sponge Band’.

According to Tech Planet’s report, this recording and music editing app also features AI tools, and notes that it is particularly “helpful for users who want to further improve audio effects and background music for short videos”.

BW