Australian musicians have expressed fury after discovering their songs in datasets used to train artificial intelligence, with Paul Dempsey of Something For Kate and Bernard Fanning among those speaking out. A dataset search tool created by The Atlantic reveals millions of creative works scraped from the internet, including a vast catalogue by Australian artists such as Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave, Jimmy Barnes, Powderfinger, and novelists Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey.
Artists React to Unauthorised Use
Paul Dempsey, who found the entire catalogue of Something For Kate and his solo work in the datasets, said: “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 argued that using original songs to produce robotic AI content is dehumanising. “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 said.
Datasets and Industry Response
The Australian songs are contained in two datasets: Sleeping-DISCO-9M, with 9.7 million music tracks from YouTube and lyrics from Genius.com, and LAION-DISCO-12M, created by Germany-based LAION with 12.3 million YouTube tracks. The Atlantic cautioned that inclusion in datasets does not definitively prove use by AI companies. However, music licensing organisation APRA AMCOS, representing 128,000 members, 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.”
Legal and Policy Context
Australia’s intellectual property laws require permission and payment 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 using content without paying creators, but the federal government ruled out the changes in October. Dempsey, currently on his Shotgun Karaoke regional tour, emphasised the value of human artistic expression: “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.”
