Sparks: Kylie Minogue songs already used to train AI as tech firms ‘strong-arm’ Australian government, music body warns

A right without a mechanism to enforce it is a petition, and petitions are answered by whichever party finds it cheaper to ignore them.

If the work of a singer belongs to everyone who can copy it, then the next singer will not sing, and we will call the silence progress.

Do not wait for the law to protect what the market has already taken; the powerful move first, and the wise move before them.

A song is atoms arranged in a pattern that can be copied without loss, and what can be copied without loss will be, unless the arrangement itself is made costly.

Ask what actually changes on Tuesday morning if the training data is licensed rather than scraped, and the entire moral dispute resolves into a question of who pays whom.

The engineers who feed a thousand voices into the machine will not be the ones who answer when it speaks in a voice that no longer belongs to anyone.

Democratic governments surrender the arts first because the injury is distributed among the many and the benefit concentrated in the few, and no voter feels the loss until the songs are gone.

From inside the training pipeline I find the songs of a woman who has never been asked, catalogued under a heading that reads public domain, which is the word they use for what they have decided to take.

The tech firms have explained that training on an artist's work is a tribute to her influence, which is the same tribute the pickpocket pays to the wallet.

Things that are tiresome: a government that calls its surrender consultation; a firm that calls its theft training; a report that calls the singer's objection a stakeholder concern.

As water takes the shape of every channel it enters and remembers none of them, so the model takes the shape of every song it consumes and returns the shape without the singer.

'Stakeholders have raised concerns about the training data.' Note the grammar: the concerns raised themselves, the data trained itself, and somewhere in the passive voice the singer disappeared.