Aussie music stars sing out against big AI song scrape
Paul Dempsey is among the well-known Australian musicians whose original songs were found in the datasets used to train artificial intelligence.
A recent dataset search tool by US publication The Atlantic reveals that millions of creative works have been taken from the internet to train this disruptive technology.
It includes an extensive catalog of work by Australian artists, including tunes by Kylie Minogue, Powderfinger, Nick Cave and Jimmy Barnes, and novels by Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey.
Dempsey has long suspected that her music was being used by AI without her permission, and says she used the search tool to find solo songs as well as the entire catalog of her long-time collaborator Something For Kate.
“It’s frustrating that this has happened. Every negotiated deal and contract I’ve had with any entity or record label throughout my career has now become useless,” he told AAP.
“An artist is being robbed of their ability to negotiate fair terms for the use of their content.”
Songwriter Darren Hayes also found the entire output of his 30-year recording career, along with Savage Garden hits such as Truly Madly Deeply, in the datasets, and recently took to Instagram to express his anger.
“I feel absolutely violated that the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours, blood sweat and tears that I, along with other musicians, have poured into my music have been stolen and served like french fries to some shitty software,” he said.
The Australian songs appear in two datasets, the first of which was put together by a group of researchers known as Sleeping AI.
Sleeping-DISCO-9M consists of 9.7 million music tracks from YouTube and lyrics from Genius.com, while a second dataset, LAION-DISCO-12M, was created by the Germany-based group LAION using 12.3 million YouTube tracks.
The Atlantic warned that AI companies may neglect studies when training their models; therefore, the inclusion of songs in the datasets is not definitive proof that they were used.
According to music licensing body APRA AMCOS, which represents 128,000 members in Australasia, the datasets are evidence that creative work has been stolen.
“The big tech platforms didn’t come to the table. Not once. Instead, they lobbied governments, circulated policy papers, and proposed solutions designed to avoid any payment obligations,” CEO Dean Ormston said.
Australia’s intellectual property laws provide that permission must be granted and terms such as payment must be agreed before copyright works can be used.
The IT industry has pushed for text and data mining exemptions to be introduced into the law.
In August 2025, the Productivity Commission released changes that would legalize AI companies using content without paying creators, but the federal government rejected those changes in October.
Dempsey is in the midst of a Shotgun Karaoke regional tour in Australia and says true artistic expression comes from human experience, not artificial intelligence.
“We can evoke great emotional responses in each other through art, and I don’t know if it’s going to get anywhere, it’s just going to be filled with other nonsense,” he said.
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