It wrote me a song in thirty seconds. Is that allowed?

It is doing the same trick as the picture tools

A music tool works the way a picture tool does, on sound rather than light. It learned what a cheerful song about a cat tends to sound like, and it makes one that has never existed.

It is not stitching together clips of other songs. That matters legally and it matters practically, because it means you cannot find the original by listening hard. There is no original.

What it does have is a strong sense of what a genre sounds like, which is why the results feel familiar without being anything in particular.

PIXEL / THE COACH

I asked for a sea shanty about a broken boiler and got something my nan would clap along to. I have listened to it more than I am prepared to write down.

What it is actually good for

A song for somebody's birthday. Background music for a video that would otherwise be silent or would otherwise be someone else's music used without asking. A jingle for a village fete.

These are real uses and the alternative was usually nothing at all, or a copyright strike. It is worth saying that plainly, because the interesting argument is not about the person making a song for their nan.

It is less good at being the thing itself. It has no idea what the song is about, so it cannot be moved by it, and after a few listens that tends to show.

The argument that is not settled

Music tools learned from recorded music, and a great deal of recorded music was made by people who were not asked and were not paid for that use.

Some providers say they licensed what they trained on. Others have not said. There is active litigation, and the UK Intellectual Property Office has been consulting on where the line sits, which is what a live question looks like from the outside.

We are not going to tell you how it will land, because we do not know, and a site that pretended to would be doing the thing this one exists to complain about.

If you make things for a living

This is a change to the floor rather than to the ceiling. The work most at risk is the functional kind: the library track, the thirty seconds under a corporate video, the jingle.

That work paid a lot of musicians. Saying so is not doom, and pretending otherwise would be worse than useless to somebody deciding what to do next.

What has not changed is anything that depends on it being by somebody. A tool can produce a competent song about grief. It cannot have been there.

See it for yourself

Reading about it only gets you so far. This one is written to show you the thing described above, rather than describe it again.

If you remember nothing else

• It generates a new song rather than assembling old ones. There is no original to find.
• Genuinely good for the birthday video and the fete.
• What it trained on is unsettled, and anybody telling you otherwise is guessing.
• Say when something was generated, before somebody else notices.
• The functional end of music is where this lands hardest.