The Hill: AI learned to sing in Spanish. Latin artists need to get paid.

When Bad Bunny first heard “Demo 5: Nostalgia” — a reggaetón song circulating on TikTok sung in a convincing artificial clone of his voice, alongside fake verses from Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber — he did not laugh it off. He went to his WhatsApp channel and told any fan who enjoyed it to leave the group.

The problem has only gotten bigger since.

Considering the nominees for the 27th Annual Latin Grammy Awards have just been announced this week, as National Hispanic Heritage Month begins, it’s time to examine what is at stake here for Latin artists.

First, we can look at the scale of what unsettled Bad Bunny. An investigation this summer by The Atlantic uncovered AI training datasets containing roughly 21.2 million tracks, including Bad Bunny’s catalog, ingested without authorization or compensation.

Universal Music Group and Sony Music are suing the AI platform Suno, having identified tens of thousands of their recordings inside its training data. Somewhere in those datasets sit the rhythms of reggaetón, the melodies of salsa, the voices of Latin trap — the raw material of the world’s most streamed music, converted into fuel for machines.