Advertising agencies are handing Australian composers AI-made music and asking them to rebuild it by hand, according to Antony Partos, co-founder of the Sydney studio Sonar Music. A client presents an AI track, approves it, and then wants the composers to copy it so the finished piece can carry a human author.
“The message is simple: Australian creativity is not free training data.”
Antony Partos, chair of the AGSC Industrial Relations Committee, on the Human Made campaign · themusicnetwork.com ↗
Partos will not name the clients but says they include big fast-food and streaming brands. Cornel Wilczek, vice president of the Australian Guild of Screen Composers, describes the same pattern: most of the calls he took last year asked him to make AI tracks sound more human. He closed his Melbourne studio in 2025 and let seven staff go after advertising work dried up, which he blames on the rise of Suno and tighter post-pandemic ad budgets.
Wilczek expects AI music to spread into television and low-budget short films, and fears a system could generate whole feature scores from his existing work. Partos argues that composers cannot copy something possibly built from illegally harvested material, and wants a licensing system that pays artists who opt in. He adds that APRA AMCOS already licenses music and collects royalties without any change to copyright law, yet AI firms have not approached it and it was not consulted on the proposed changes.
Composer Antony Partos, co-founder of Sonar Music, who leads the guild's Human Made campaign
Declan Blackall · Image: Campaign Brief
The guild launches its Human Made campaign at the APRA AMCOS Screen Music Awards in Brisbane on Wednesday 28 October, where composers will wear record-shaped badges carrying a copyright symbol. Partos is up for four awards, including Christy and The Artful Dodger, and Sonar co-founder Matteo Zingales is nominated for Sunny Nights.
About Antony Partos
Antony Partos is an Australian film and television composer who blends acoustic and electronic sound with world instruments. His feature credits include Animal Kingdom, The Rover and The Home Song Stories. In 2010 he and fellow composer Andrew Lancaster formed the Sydney music production house Sonar Music.
In November 2022 he and Matteo Zingales won Best Music for a Television Series or Serial at the Screen Music Awards for Total Control, a score published by Sonar Music. He was named composer of Disney+ and Hulu's The Artful Dodger ahead of its premiere on 29 November 2023.
Michael LeVene, chair of the Australian AI Industry Group, says recreating AI music so it looks human-made raises questions of transparency, attribution and integrity. The federal government is weighing copyright changes to accommodate AI development, and a joint parliamentary committee on AI and Australian creative work in model training is due to report by the end of November.
Artwork for the Human Made campaign, whose badge is a record carrying the copyright symbol
Image: Campaign Brief