Music generator ProducerAI joins Google Labs

The generative AI music tool ProducerAI will become part of Google Labs, the company announced on Tuesday.

Backed by The Chainsmokers, the ProducerAI platform allows users to write natural language requests — something like “make a lofi beat”– to generate music. It uses Google DeepMind’s Lyria 3 music-generation model, which can turn text and even image inputs into audio outputs.

Google announced last week that its Lyria 3 capabilities would be introduced into the flagship Gemini app, but ProducerAI makes it possible for users to communicate with the AI model more like it’s a “collaboration partner,” to use the words of Elias Roman, Google Labs’ Senior Director of Product Management.

“ProducerAI has allowed me to create in new ways,” Roman wrote in a blog post. “I’ve experimented with new genre blends, expressed how I feel with personalized birthday songs for my loved ones, and made custom workout soundtracks for myself and friends.”

Google also shared that three-time Grammy-winning rapper Wyclef Jean used the Lyria 3 model and Google’s Music AI Sandbox on his recent song “Back From Abu Dhabi.”

“This is not just a machine where you’re clicking a button a hundred times, and then you’re done. It’s a careful kind of curation where you’re going through and saying, ‘Oh, I think that’s something we can use,’” said Jeff Chang, Director of Product Management at Google DeepMind, in a video the company put out.

Jean recalls wanting to know what a flute would sound like in a track he already recorded, and being able to use Google’s tools to quickly add a flute sound to the mix.

“What I want everybody to understand […] is you’re in the era where the human has to be the most creative,” Jean said in the video. “There’s one thing that you have over the AI: a soul. And there’s one thing that AI has over you: the infinite information.”

AI in the music industry

Some musicians have ardently opposed the use of AI tools in the music-making process, since it’s almost a given that a generative AI tool was trained on copyrighted data from artists without their consent. Hundreds of musicians, including stars like Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, and Jon Bon Jovi, signed an open letter in 2024 calling on tech companies not to undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools.

A cohort of music publishers also recently sued the AI company Anthropic for $3 billion, claiming that the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, song lyrics, and musical compositions. (Anthropic was already ordered by the court to offer a $1.5 billion settlement to authors whose books were pirated for AI training.)

Other artists, however, have embraced the potential of this technology as a way to improve audio quality, rather than as a creative aid.

Paul McCartney used AI-powered noise reduction systems — the kind of technology that allows Zoom or FaceTime to block out unwanted background noises on your video calls — to clean up a decades-old, low-quality John Lennon demo. The resulting “new” Beatles track, “Now and Then,” won a Grammy in 2025.

Meanwhile, AI music generation tools like Suno have created synthetic music that sounds real enough to top charts on Spotify and Billboard. Telisha Jones, a 31-year-old in Mississippi, used Suno to turn her (supposedly organic) poetry into the viral R&B song “How Was I Supposed To Know” and signed a record deal with Hallwood Media in a deal reportedly worth $3 million.

The law remains unclear on the legality of using copyrighted works as training data — one federal judge, William Alsup, ruled last year that training on copyrighted data is legal, but pirating it is not.