When pop legend Tina Arena first heard an AI-generated version of her own singing voice, she called it what many artists are now saying out loud: “It’s daylight robbery. It’s theft.”
Her words echo a growing fear across creative industries — that the very essence of human expression is being cloned, commodified, and sold without consent.
Musicians: Voices Without Consent
From Drake to Grimes to Tina Arena, AI systems are cloning vocals within hours, producing new songs that sound nearly indistinguishable from the originals.
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In 2023, a viral AI track called Heart on My Sleeve mimicked Drake and The Weeknd so convincingly it racked up millions of streams before being taken down.
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Grimes took a different approach, openly licensing her voice to AI projects in exchange for royalties — but only because she wanted a choice in the matter.
Most artists don’t get that choice. Their voices, melodies, and decades of work are fed into algorithms without permission.
Authors: Books Turned Into Machine Fuel
Bestselling novelist David Baldacci describes the experience of seeing ChatGPT generate a story “that sounded like me” within seconds:
“It was like someone backed up a truck, stole everything I’d created, and drove away.”
He isn’t alone.
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Novelists like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham have joined class action lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging their works were scraped without permission to train large language models.
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The Authors Guild found hundreds of copyrighted books — including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — inside datasets used to build AI systems.
Visual Artists: Styles Stolen Pixel by Pixel
Illustrators and designers have also discovered their unique styles being replicated by AI image generators.
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The LAION-5B dataset, which trained Stable Diffusion, scraped billions of images from the web — many of them copyrighted artworks.
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Artists like Sarah Andersen (Sarah’s Scribbles) and Kelly McKernan saw their distinctive illustrations reproduced by AI without attribution or royalties.
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Some AI image tools even allow users to type in a living artist’s name to generate new work “in their style.”
Voice Actors: Silenced by Synthetic Voices
Australian voice actor Jackie Duncan lost out on a lucrative bank commercial to an AI-generated voice. She’s not the only one:
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James Earl Jones’s iconic Darth Vader voice is now digitally preserved by AI — with his blessing. But many lesser-known actors are finding their voices cloned without pay or credit.
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In gaming, companies are reportedly using AI to generate background character dialogue instead of hiring actors.
The Bigger Picture
Goldman Sachs estimates AI could disrupt 300 million jobs worldwide. In Australia alone, one-third of the workforce may feel the effects within five years.
Some argue AI will create new industries. Others see only loss. But for now, the imbalance is clear: big tech companies reap billions, while the artists, authors, and performers who fuel these systems are left unpaid and uncredited.
A Call for Guardrails
As Tina Arena put it:
“Pay me for it, or at least give me the choice. That’s democratic.”
The question isn’t whether AI will change culture — it already has. The real question is whether the people who built our cultural foundations will be respected, or erased.
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