Australian screen composers launch “Human Made” AI copyright campaign at the 2026 Screen Music Awards

Australian composers are being asked to recreate AI-generated tracks, including for ads, “so productions can claim there’s a human author”. That’s Antony Partos, co-founder of Sydney music house Sonar Music, speaking to Campaign Brief about the campaign he’s about to launch.

It’s called Human Made. The Australian Guild of Screen Composers (AGSC) unveils it at the APRA AMCOS Screen Music Awards in Brisbane on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, where composers, musicians and industry guests will wear record-shaped badges with a © on them.

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The message is simple: Australian creativity is not free training data.

The timing is pointed. The ABC reported in September that the Attorney-General’s department was consulting on letting AI companies train on copyrighted work unless the owner opts out, and Human Made is the composers’ answer to that.

What the Human Made campaign asks the Australian government for

Partos wants the default flipped. Instead of AI companies training on everything unless someone objects, he wants a licence system that pays the composers who choose to say yes. He told The Music Network:

“If AI needs copyrighted material to train its models, then a license system needs to be implemented to compensate those artists who chose to opt in.”

His model already exists. APRA AMCOS licenses music and pays creators without anyone changing copyright law, and the campaign says the AI companies haven’t approached it.

Officially, Canberra ruled out an AI training exemption in October 2025. But the parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence told the government this month to examine copyright settings, which ARIA and PPCA pushed back on, and ICMP says Australia is the only one of 62 countries still weighing a commercial AI training exception. The committee’s final report is due in November.

Why Antony Partos says recreating AI tracks puts composers in a bind

Here’s how the job he described works. A production generates a track with AI, then pays a composer to remake it. On paper, the result now has a human author.

Partos says that’s exactly the problem, because nobody knows what the AI track was built from:

“It’s an extraordinary position to put a composer in. We can’t copy something that may have been built from illegally harvested creative work.”

The money behind the fight is real. Screen Australia puts Australian film and TV drama production at a record A$2.7 billion in 2024 to 2025, up 43% on the year before, and that’s the market Australian screen composers work in.

Partos has a lot riding on this week personally too. He’s up for 4 awards: Best Feature Film Score and Best Soundtrack Album for Christy, Best Music for a Television Drama for Disney’s The Artful Dodger, and Best Music for a Documentary for Edge of Life. His Sonar co-founder Matteo Zingales is nominated for Sunny Nights.

One naming note, so you don’t mix them up. In the US, the American Federation of Musicians runs a separate campaign called Human Made, Human Paid, about how labels share AI licensing money with session players. Neither side has announced a link.

So on Wednesday night in Brisbane, the people who score Australian TV will collect their awards wearing a ©. The committee report in November will show whether Canberra was watching.