It turns out the tech bros aren't just lack-of-original-thought entrepreneurs—they're also digital kleptomaniacs. A newly released search tool from US publication The Atlantic has revealed that millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train generative AI. Among the victims are legendary Australian artists like Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Powderfinger, and Jimmy Barnes, whose songs were quietly slurped up into massive datasets. Even acclaimed novelists like Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey couldn't escape the digital vacuum cleaner.

The scale of this database heist is wild. The scraped songs are sitting in two massive datasets. The first, Sleeping-DISCO-9M (created by a group called Sleeping AI), features 9.7 million music tracks from YouTube plus lyrics from Genius.com. The second, LAION-DISCO-12M (put together by Germany-based group LAION), features a whopping 12.3 million YouTube tracks. That's over 22 million tracks fed into the machine, proving that your favorite algorithms didn't learn how to make music from scratch; they just copy-pasted real human talent.

Paul Dempsey of Something For Kate, who is currently playing gigs on his Shotgun Karaoke regional tour, found his entire band and solo catalog in the database. Dempsey had long suspected this was happening, but seeing the proof made it clear that the system is broken. He pointed out that every single legal contract and negotiated agreement he has signed over his entire career is rendered useless if tech companies can just bypass the rules. It completely destroys an artist's ability to negotiate fair terms for their own property.

Bernard Fanning, former frontman of Powderfinger, took a more philosophical swing at the machine, calling the use of original songs to make robotic content dehumanizing. Fanning pointed out that robots aren't alive, they don't experience anything, and they just aggregate existing human data. He asked if we really want robots synthesizing our feelings and telling our stories, concluding that the entire concept simply sucks.

But the prize for the most raw reaction goes to Savage Garden songwriter Darren Hayes. After discovering his entire 30-year recording career—including mega-hits like Truly Madly Deeply—had been scraped, Hayes took to Instagram to vent. He stated he felt completely violated that hundreds of hours of actual blood, sweat, and tears were stolen and served up like French fries to a piece of software that spits out trash. It's hard to blame him for being furious when his life's work is being treated like fast-food inputs for a machine.