The Atlantic piece on music datasets gets a bunch right - it’s fair to assume if your music meets the grade of a curated 12m dataset it has been included in big general models (all ours is in there).It also misses a lot of important context. I’ve spent near a decade on this issue so apologize in advance for burdening you with the baroque complications. They are annoying, and important. I wrote this extremely quickly, feel free to AMA. For the sake of brevity, lets say there are 4 main reasons a musician might care if their work is used to train music models:The music model may compete with your original musicYou want to be paid for the use of your data You are concerned about people using models to impersonate youYou would prefer AI models be banished from the universeThe piece alludes to this, although does so in an imprecise way. The common argument goes like this: a company used your music to train a model that then may flood the market with songs that your music has to compete with. Seems a clear case of infringement, your music was used to compete with your music! For better or worse, copyright law is much more complicated.Copyright law does not protect you from general competition. It protects you from someone copying significant parts of your song and selling that copied material commercially. If, as is the case with general models like Suno, the songs being output from their model are defensibly new, you are no more protected from that competition as you would be from any human song on the market.There is recent legal precedent establishing this. In Bartz v Anthropic, despite Anthropic admitting to buying and scanning second hand books (and pirating books they had to pay a hefty fine for), the judge found the AI outputs to be “spectacularly transformative” and as such, fair use. The same would apply to almost all AI music outputs. No copying / no competition. This will be contested, but they have a point.The Atlantic piece shows examples of very popular song