Kabza De Small's music appear in documented AI training datasets more than 350 times.
The distinct sounds of South African music - from amapiano to local hip hop - are being quietly harvested by global artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
Technology firms are allegedly scraping local music catalogues to train AI models without permission, credit or compensation.
By feeding music from artists like Kabza De Small, Nasty C and DJ Maphorisa into machine learning systems, these companies are developing commercial software capable of generating synthetic music, raising fears that South African culture is being monetised without rewarding its creators.
Data scraping occurs when AI bots crawl the internet to download vast amounts of music and metadata.
