Australian musicians sound warning note after Nick Cave, Kylie and many more slurped into AI training tool | Culture
Publish Date: 2026-06-25 21:42:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning are among big-name Australian musicians upset that their original songs have been found in datasets used to train artificial intelligence.
A dataset search tool recently created by US publication The Atlantic reveals millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train the disruptive technology.
It includes a vast catalogue of work by Australian artists, with tunes by Kylie Minogue, Powderfinger, Nick Cave and Jimmy Barnes, and novels by Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey.
Dempsey had long suspected his music was being used by AI without his permission, and said he found the entire catalogue of his longtime band Something For Kate, as well as his solo tunes, using the search tool.
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“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,” he told AAP.
“An artist’s ability to negotiate fair terms for the use of their content is just being ripped away from them.”
There is increasing concern about the widespread ingestion of copyright or private content to train artificial intelligence, a practice dubbed ‘slurping’.
Using original songs to produce robotic AI content is ultimately dehumanising, Bernard Fanning argued.
“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.”
Songwriter Darren Hayes found in the datasets the entire output of his 30-year recording career, including Savage Garden hits such as Truly Madly Deeply, and recently took to Instagram to express his fury.
“I absolutely feel violated that all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours, blood,…
