Australian musicians including Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning have expressed outrage after discovering their original songs were included in datasets used to train artificial intelligence. A dataset search tool created by US publication The Atlantic revealed millions of creative works scraped from the internet, including a vast catalogue of Australian artists such as Kylie Minogue, Powderfinger, Nick Cave, Jimmy Barnes, and novelists Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey.
Artists Discover Their Music in AI Training Sets
Paul Dempsey, frontman of Something For Kate, found his band's entire catalogue and his solo work in the datasets. He told AAP, “It’s frustrating this is happening. Every negotiated agreement and contract I’ve ever gone into in my career with whatever entity or record label is all just rendered useless. An artist’s ability to negotiate fair terms for the use of their content is just being ripped away from them.”
Bernard Fanning, former Powderfinger lead singer, argued that using original songs to produce robotic AI content is dehumanizing. “Do we want robots telling our stories and synthesising our feelings? Because it’s not human. The whole point of art is to humanise our feelings, to express how we’re feeling across the whole range of emotions,” he told AAP. “Robots aren’t alive; they don’t experience, they just aggregate – and the idea of that sucks.”
Savage Garden's Darren Hayes Voices Fury
Songwriter Darren Hayes found the entire output of his 30-year recording career, including Savage Garden hits like “Truly Madly Deeply,” in the datasets. He took to Instagram to express his anger: “I absolutely feel violated that all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours, blood, sweat and tears that I’ve put into my music, along with every other musician, has been stolen and served up like french fries to a piece of software that spits out shit.”
The Australian songs are contained in two datasets. The first, Sleeping-DISCO-9M, was assembled by researchers known as Sleeping AI and includes 9.7 million music tracks from YouTube, plus lyrics from Genius.com. The second, LAION-DISCO-12M, was created by Germany-based group LAION using 12.3 million YouTube tracks.
Industry and Legal Reactions
The Atlantic cautioned that AI companies might omit works when training their models, so inclusion in datasets is not definitive proof of use. However, music licensing organisation APRA AMCOS, representing 128,000 members in Australasia, called the datasets proof of theft. Chief executive Dean Ormston said, “Major tech platforms have not come to the table. Not once. Instead, they have lobbied governments, circulated policy papers, and proposed solutions designed to extinguish any obligation to pay.”
Australia’s intellectual property laws require permission and agreed terms before copyright works are used, but the IT industry has pushed for text and data mining exemptions. In August 2025, the Productivity Commission floated changes that would legalise AI companies using content without paying creators, but the federal government ruled out the changes in October.
Artistic Expression vs. AI
Dempsey, midway through his Shotgun Karaoke regional tour of Australia, emphasised that genuine artistic expression comes from human experience. “We can trigger huge emotional responses in each other through art, and I don’t know that that’s going anywhere; it’s just going to be flooded with all this other shit,” he said.
