Bob's Confetti: Phonetic Memorization Attacks in Music and Video Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Roh, Jaechul, Novack, Zachary, Peng, Yuefeng, Mireshghallah, Niloofar, Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor, Houmansadr, Amir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866915816946008064
author Roh, Jaechul
Novack, Zachary
Peng, Yuefeng
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
Houmansadr, Amir
author_facet Roh, Jaechul
Novack, Zachary
Peng, Yuefeng
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
Houmansadr, Amir
contents Generative AI systems for music and video commonly use text-based filters to prevent regurgitation of copyrighted material. We expose a significant vulnerability in this approach by introducing Adversarial PhoneTic Prompting (APT), a novel attack that bypasses these safeguards by exploiting phonetic memorization--the tendency of models to bind sub-lexical acoustic patterns (phonemes, rhyme, stress, cadence) to memorized copyrighted content. APT replaces iconic lyrics with homophonic but semantically unrelated alternatives (e.g., "mom's spaghetti" becomes "Bob's confetti"), preserving phonetic structure while evading lexical filters. We evaluate APT on leading lyrics-to-song models (Suno, YuE) across English and Korean songs spanning rap, pop, and K-pop. APT achieves 91% average similarity to copyrighted originals, versus 13.7% for random lyrics and 42.2% for semantic paraphrases. Embedding analysis confirms the mechanism: YuE's text encoder treats APT-modified lyrics as near-identical to originals (cosine similarity 0.90) while Sentence-BERT semantic similarity drops to 0.71, showing the model encodes phonetic structure over meaning. This vulnerability extends cross-modally--Veo 3 reconstructs visual scenes from original music videos when prompted with APT lyrics alone, despite no visual cues in the prompt. We further show that phonetic-semantic defense signatures fail, as APT prompts exhibit higher semantic similarity than benign paraphrases. Our findings reveal that sub-lexical acoustic structure acts as a cross-modal retrieval key, rendering current copyright filters systematically vulnerable. Demo examples are available at https://jrohsc.github.io/music_attack/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17937
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bob's Confetti: Phonetic Memorization Attacks in Music and Video Generation
Roh, Jaechul
Novack, Zachary
Peng, Yuefeng
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
Houmansadr, Amir
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
Generative AI systems for music and video commonly use text-based filters to prevent regurgitation of copyrighted material. We expose a significant vulnerability in this approach by introducing Adversarial PhoneTic Prompting (APT), a novel attack that bypasses these safeguards by exploiting phonetic memorization--the tendency of models to bind sub-lexical acoustic patterns (phonemes, rhyme, stress, cadence) to memorized copyrighted content. APT replaces iconic lyrics with homophonic but semantically unrelated alternatives (e.g., "mom's spaghetti" becomes "Bob's confetti"), preserving phonetic structure while evading lexical filters. We evaluate APT on leading lyrics-to-song models (Suno, YuE) across English and Korean songs spanning rap, pop, and K-pop. APT achieves 91% average similarity to copyrighted originals, versus 13.7% for random lyrics and 42.2% for semantic paraphrases. Embedding analysis confirms the mechanism: YuE's text encoder treats APT-modified lyrics as near-identical to originals (cosine similarity 0.90) while Sentence-BERT semantic similarity drops to 0.71, showing the model encodes phonetic structure over meaning. This vulnerability extends cross-modally--Veo 3 reconstructs visual scenes from original music videos when prompted with APT lyrics alone, despite no visual cues in the prompt. We further show that phonetic-semantic defense signatures fail, as APT prompts exhibit higher semantic similarity than benign paraphrases. Our findings reveal that sub-lexical acoustic structure acts as a cross-modal retrieval key, rendering current copyright filters systematically vulnerable. Demo examples are available at https://jrohsc.github.io/music_attack/.
title Bob's Confetti: Phonetic Memorization Attacks in Music and Video Generation
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17937