The tech giants are out here pulling off a massive digital heist, and this time they got caught red-handed. A new search tool dropped by The Atlantic has revealed that millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train AI. We are talking about legendary Australian talent like Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Jimmy Barnes, and the band Powderfinger getting their music sucked up into datasets without anybody asking for permission. Even top-tier authors like Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey got their books scraped into the mix.

This isn't some small-time operation; this is a high-tech corporate dragnet. The music is packed into two massive datasets. First up is Sleeping-DISCO-9M, created by a group called Sleeping AI, which has 9.7 million tracks taken from YouTube along with lyrics from Genius.com. Then you got LAION-DISCO-12M, put together by a German outfit called LAION, packing another 12.3 million YouTube tracks. They are basically taking millions of hours of real music, putting it in a blender, and using it to teach robots how to replicate human talent for free.

Paul Dempsey, the frontman for Something For Kate who is currently on his regional Shotgun Karaoke tour, found his whole band catalog and solo music in the dataset. Dempsey said he always suspected this was happening behind the scenes, but seeing the proof is a different story. He kept it 100, explaining that every contract and deal he ever signed throughout his career is rendered completely useless if tech companies can just bypass the rules and take whatever they want. It completely strips away an artist's power to negotiate fair terms.

Bernard Fanning from Powderfinger called out the whole automated wave, saying that using real songs to make robotic content is straight-up dehumanizing. Fanning argued that the whole point of making art is to express real human feelings. Since robots aren't alive and don't actually live through any experiences, they are just aggregating other people's vibes. He didn't sugarcoat it, saying the whole idea of robots telling our stories sucks.

Darren Hayes, the songwriter behind Savage Garden, went completely off on Instagram when he found his entire 30-year career—including massive hits like Truly Madly Deeply—inside the datasets. Hayes said he felt violated that the hundreds of hours of blood, sweat, and tears he and other musicians put into their craft were stolen and served up like French fries to a piece of software that just spits out garbage. That's real talk—building a career for 30 years just to have a machine copy your style without paying you is crazy.