Australian musicians Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning have expressed outrage after discovering their original songs, along with works by Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, and other Australian artists, were included in datasets used to train artificial intelligence. The discovery was made through a dataset search tool created by US publication The Atlantic, which reveals millions of creative works scraped from the internet for AI training.
Extent of the slurping
The datasets include a vast catalogue of Australian music, with tunes by Kylie Minogue, Powderfinger, Nick Cave, Jimmy Barnes, and novels by Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey. Dempsey, frontman of Something For Kate, found his entire band's catalogue and solo works 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.”
The practice of ingesting copyright or private content to train AI, known as 'slurping', has raised increasing concern. The Australian songs are contained in two datasets: Sleeping-DISCO-9M, assembled by researchers Sleeping AI, comprising 9.7 million music tracks from YouTube and lyrics from Genius.com; and LAION-DISCO-12M, created by Germany-based LAION using 12.3 million YouTube tracks.
Artists speak out
Bernard Fanning 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. Robots aren’t alive; they don’t experience, they just aggregate – and the idea of that sucks,” he told AAP.
Songwriter Darren Hayes, who found his entire 30-year recording career in the datasets including Savage Garden hits, took to Instagram to express fury: “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.”
Industry and legal implications
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. CEO 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 have legalised AI companies using content without paying creators, but the federal government ruled out the changes in October.
Dempsey, currently on his Shotgun Karaoke regional tour, said genuine artistic expression comes from human experience, not AI. “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.
