My BRCA Poem Became an Eminem Song. Now What?

On AI music, who gets to make culture, and one very unlikely collaboration I'm hoping for.

Lauren Berkowitz · Apr 15, 2026

My father called me on a Tuesday evening a number of years ago. He had done 23andMe the way a lot of people do, curious about ancestry, about how Jewish we were -- the ordinary reasons. There was no family history that would have put me on alert, no signal. He called, and what he told me changed the trajectory of my life.

I carry a BRCA1 mutation, a pathogenic gene variant that dramatically increases the likelihood of breast, ovarian, pancreatic, and prostate cancer. Many people learned it existed when Angelina Jolie wrote about it in 2013. Those of us who carry it learn about it the way I did: a phone call, unexpected, in an ordinary week.

I've spent enough time in the music industry and enough time writing about AI to have some thoughts on what happened when I fed a poem about that experience into an AI music generator and it came back sounding like Eminem. I was an SVP at Sony and EMI, negotiating digital deals with Apple, Amazon, and Google when that was still a new thing to do. I'm a lawyer, and I write about AI and what it costs us humans at my Substack, Ctrl Alt Human.

The instinct when you hear 'Suno produced an Eminem-sounding track' is to assume it trained directly on his recordings and is essentially reproducing them at one step removed. My guess, reasoning backward from the output, is that what I fed it mattered more than any single artist's catalog. Those are the defining characteristics of a whole ecosystem of hip-hop that Eminem both came from and shaped: staccato rhythm, internal rhyme, forward momentum, words that hit like percussion. Whether the model found him specifically or found the genre he dominates, I can't say.

Style is not copyrightable, and what's copyrightable is the specific fixed expression. Producing something that sounds like Eminem is legally different from reproducing one of his songs, and the music industry's current AI lawsuits are about something much bigger than any single output.

If he ever heard it, I hope the first feeling wouldn't be violation, but something closer to wonder. Because the model reached for him, out of everything it could have chosen, to carry something into a world he may have never seen before. That's a new kind of reach.