{"id":807178,"date":"2026-10-19T03:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T03:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/807178\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T03:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T03:20:12","slug":"kylie-minogue-songs-already-used-to-train-ai-as-tech-firms-strong-arm-australian-government-music-body-warns-australian-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/807178\/","title":{"rendered":"Kylie Minogue songs already used to train AI as tech firms \u2018strong-arm\u2019 Australian government, music body warns | Australian music"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue<\/a> and Nick Cave without compensation, the peak global body for music rights has claimed, as the Australian government has been warned against giving in to \u201cstrong-arming\u201d from tech companies seeking to weaken copyright law.<\/p>\n

The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) \u2013 which represents Sony, Warner and Universal as well as thousands of independent publishers on six continents \u2013 has warned that of the dozens of countries approached to water down copyright laws, Australia appears to be the only to consider doing so.<\/p>\n

John Phelan, the ICMP\u2019s managing director, told Guardian Australia AI companies were asking policymakers to \u201clegitimise larceny\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re trying to strong-arm Australian policymakers into \u2018if you don\u2019t do this, we won\u2019t invest\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

In July, Anthony Albanese said it would be \u201ctheft\u201d<\/a> if artists did not retain control over whether their work was used to build and train AI, and what they were paid for its use.<\/p>\n

Music, film, media and news organisations had expressed concerns the government was being lobbied by global tech companies behind closed doors to weaken Australia\u2019s copyright laws to help train AI models, without compensating the creative sectors.<\/p>\n

But government and opposition members of a parliamentary committee on artificial intelligence appeared to revisit the issue this week, describing the current situation as a stalemate.<\/p>\n

Sign up for Guardian Australia\u2019s Politics, really newsletter here<\/a><\/p>\n

They said AI models were already training on copyrighted works in the United States without compensating creators \u2013 but that without changes to local copyright laws, those companies were withholding training frontier AI models in Australia.<\/p>\n

In a joint letter to the prime minister this week, the inquiry\u2019s Labor chair, Jo Briskey, and its deputy chair, Liberal senator Jonathon Duniam, recommended the government \u201cexamine current copyright settings\u201d while ensuring creators retain control and are paid.<\/p>\n

The independent senator David Pocock has raised concerns<\/a> that the committee was coming to a position on copyright predetermined by the prime minister, after staffer edits were seen in the letter. Briskey has rejected the claim.<\/p>\n

AI companies\u2019 demands<\/p>\n

The ICMP has been tracking how AI companies are attempting to change copyright law in different jurisdictions to allow training. Phelan highlighted methods that the companies had used<\/a> to train their models on music, such as with spreadsheets containing millions of lines of music available on YouTube.<\/p>\n

A key claim of the AI industry is that its models are not trained on Australian content due to copyright rules. However, in evidence provided exclusively to Guardian Australia, ICMP showed Google\u2019s Gemini was able to reproduce lyrics from Australian artists including Kylie Minogue, G-Flip and Nick Cave<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Phelan also pointed to an AI training dataset reported by the Atlantic in June<\/a>, which contains more than 12m songs pulled from YouTube videos, including tracks from Minogue, Cave and Hilltop Hoods.<\/p>\n

Google was approached for comment.<\/p>\n

Phelan said 62 countries had considered making their own legal changes but none of the others had bought into AI companies\u2019 demands.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter |Every weekday<\/p>\n

Sign up to Politics, really<\/p>\n

Our political team brings you up to speed on the stories that really matter and what they mean for you<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThere isn\u2019t a single country among the other 61 [countries] \u2026 which has introduced a new text and data mining exception for commercial purposes, or reduce the idea of exclusive rights and copyright,\u201d Phelan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is very much watching what Australia does.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s fair to say the global music industry, as well as all creative industries worldwide we work with, are appalled by the idea of a statutory scheme or a government deal which would interfere with how Australian industries work and contract around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s special envoy, Jeffrey Bleich, told the AI committee last week the company was not trying to dictate terms, but had shared information with the Australian government about training and what the implications would be \u201cwith respect to our capacity to operate here\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t license the entire internet. Billions and billions of information exists there which is available to be viewed and studied, and that\u2019s essentially what training is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder existing Australian law<\/a>, it\u2019s our understanding that that could be determined to be illegal if we weren\u2019t able to find a licence with every single person who had rights within Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s chief of economic policy, Adam Cohen, said the fair use exception in US law \u201cfundamentally protects\u201d the development of new technology. He pointed to agreements made with News Corp and the Guardian as examples of where the company makes deals for the use of work, despite arguing US law did not require such.<\/p>\n

Phelan said he believed panic had set in among the AI companies over the sheer cost of investment and the need to make a return, coupled with the ongoing litigation over copyright in the US. He said they may be looking to Australia for a legislative solution.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re seeing the legislative side as being the way to try to [find] a place to do business without licences, which will secure their future business model.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a submission to the inquiry, Guardian Australia said that undermining copyright protection would have a \u201cprofound impact on civil society\u201d and copyright-protected material should only be available for AI training with the rights holder\u2019s explicit prior authorisation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-807178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}