That Puerto Rico song going viral on TikTok is AI-generated

@saxboybilly18 roped me in with a TikTok song about Akron, Ohio last August. I watched it, kept scrolling, and never thought about it again. The video, 45 seconds long and mildly catchy, was more a funny bit about the Summit County mecca than an interesting song—a real “hey, I know about Summa Health, the RubberDucks, and the Chase Bank designed by LeBron James” moment. I’d never watched any of @saxboybilly18’s TikToks before, nor did I keep tabs on his account afterward. But if you check out his page, you can see that he’s done this for dozens of places he’s visited. Destinations like Tempe, Columbus, Niagara Falls, Key West, Rochester, Sheffield, and Sunnyside Queens barely scratch the surface of his content. 

But last month, his “Puerto Rico Song” went viral on the app. Currently, the video sits at 200.7k likes and 2.5 million views. For a “famous” TikTok creator, those are rookie numbers, but none of @saxboybilly18’s other city song videos have eclipsed half a million views. And, considering how many other creators have posted their own videos using the audio, the actual statistics on @saxboybilly18’s page only tell one part of the story. Recently, country singer Luke Combs, English Teacher star Brian Jordan Alvarez, actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, and the Party Animals (noted rival team of the Savannah Bananas baseball team) have posted clips using the “Puerto Rico Song” audio. Obviously, that’s not an A-list roundup, but the music has been used in 26.2k posts globally on the platform. 

The “Puerto Rico Song” uses a pentatonic scale, a fundamental part of music theory that’s helped produce some of the biggest pop hits since recorded music began. The opening lyric, “First time in San Juan, mi hijo / Capital of Puerto Rico,” is an instant earworm, and the song utilizes an uncomplicated combination of tense fifths and warm Fs—a technique popularized by Motown and other pop dynasties 60, 70 years ago. One commenter even said it “sounds like all those great 80s sitcom theme songs,” which of course it does, because it’s at a 110 bpm tempo, uses a I-IV-V-VI chord progression, and has perfect pitch. Mass enjoyment is part of the design, just like a network sitcom—and just like every other AI “creation.”

This isn’t a gotcha moment; @saxboybilly18 writes his own lyrics but openly admits to generating the music with Suno (an AI music-generation application) in his TikTok bio. I don’t blame anybody for thinking the “Puerto Rico Song” is catchy or liking it—I certainly don’t check the bio of every TikToker whose videos I interact with on the platform—but I do think there’s something devastating about this clip’s popularity. AI has now been trained well enough that the average listener can’t distinguish the “Puerto Rico Song” from a human-made track. Who needs to master music theory when you can generate its effects with a prompt? It’s a symptom of patterned enjoyment. Rudimentary music composition, once crafted for gen-pop commercialism and radio sustainability, is now so formulaic in the streaming age that a computer program can mimic it expertly and effortlessly. This isn’t an artistic breakthrough or some miracle of technology; it’s merely a quick fix for “godless whores” looking to monetize their vacation diaries.

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