Australian musicians sound warning note after Nick Cave, Kylie and many more slurped into AI training tool
TL;DR
The Atlantic released a dataset search tool showing millions of creative works scraped into AI training datasets, including major Australian music and books. Reported names include Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Powderfinger, Jimmy Barnes, Paul Dempsey, Bernard Fanning and Darren Hayes. The music appears in Sleeping-DISCO-9M, with 9.7 million YouTube tracks plus Genius lyrics, and LAION-DISCO-12M, with 12.3 million YouTube tracks.
Nauti's Take
This is not a minor metadata mess; it is a power issue. AI companies and dataset builders keep treating culture like loose raw material, then debate the invoice only after artists find their work in public tools.
The PR caveat that dataset inclusion is not final proof of model training matters legally, but it is thin editorial cover. If you collect millions of songs, permission should come before ingestion, not after the backlash.
Briefingshow
This turns the copyright fight around generative music into something concrete: not vague data, but full catalogues by working artists. If scraping bypasses contracts, licences and bargaining power, value shifts from creators to platforms. Australia recently rejected broad text and data mining exemptions, but the tech industry pressure has not gone away.
Sources