AI copyright exemption idea has set the robot among the pigeons

The proposal by the Productivity Commission to give internationally owned AI companies exemptions from the Australian Copyright Act so they can mine locally copyrighted work to train artificial intelligence large language models, such as ChatGPT, is an idea whose time has not come.

AI is already enjoying a free for all and transforming the way Australians work, learn and play. But the commission’s harnessing data and digital technology interim report recommended weakening copyright protections, adding that AI-specific regulation should be a last resort while stressing that data underpinned growth and value in the digital economy and “a mature data-sharing regime” could add up to $10 billion to Australia’s annual economic output.

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A mounting backlash is growing to halt the runaway technology.

Australia’s media bosses are directly lobbying Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the threat posed by AI, uniting with authors, musicians and artists to oppose the proposal.

Of course, the Herald, published by Nine Entertainment, has a vested interest in this issue: Nine chief executive Matt Stanton took the media’s fears directly to Albanese last month, as Labor attempts to rein in digital behemoths against the spectre of retaliation from the Trump administration for countries that regulate US tech giants. Additionally, a letter from Australia’s top media firms and creative bodies to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland vowed to fight the erosion of copyright protections.

As the arrival of computers and mobile phones illustrated, new technology is a boon for boosters and naysayers. AI has been spruiked as bringing an intellectual revolution as profound as the Enlightenment, but the glow has dimmed: there are reports of its use as a propaganda tool to interfere with US elections and the International Labour Organisation estimated 70 per cent of the tasks done by humans could be done or improved by AI, including 32 per cent of jobs in Australia.

Meanwhile, despite Australian media companies taking explicit steps to protect themselves, some of the world’s richest men openly continue to ignore moves to control their avarice. ChatGPT owner OpenAI, Perplexity and other artificial intelligence giants are crawling and scraping major Australian news websites tens of millions of times a month and pocketing untold swags of dollars.

New figures from Nine Entertainment reveal the sheer number of times OpenAI and its rivals are scraping news outlets to inform their AI products – in the month of June, Nine websites were crawled almost 10 times every second by all AI firms, fuelling OpenAI’s rapid rise to a $770 billion valuation.

The commission’s copyright proposal has enraged others. Midnight Oil frontman and former Labor minister Peter Garrett slammed the commission’s recommendation to throw copyright to the wind and allow text and data mining of songs without compensating songwriters. “The rampant opportunism of big tech aiming to pillage other people’s work for their own profit is galling and shameful,” Garrett told News Corp.

The commission’s naive proposal is oblivious to the risks involved. AI will change lives, but the media and creative industries should not carry the cost.

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