Sam Altman says governments need to find way to make AI thrive as Australia mulls sacrificing creatives for tech billions
OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman is pushing for AI to ‘thrive’ but writers, artists and musicians warn of devastating consequences if copyright laws are relaxed to fuel the AI race.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman says governments must work out how to ensure artificial intelligence thrives, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese refuses to rule out changing copyright law to allow tech companies to freely mine content to train AI models.
Mr Altman was speaking as he launched OpenAI’s latest model, ChatGPT-5, which he said was a step closer to unlocking artificial general intelligence – a capability that would surpass human cognitive ability. He described it as a “superpower”.
This followed Atlassian billionaire and Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar urging the government to change copyright law to allow tech companies to mine content and text to train models. He said such an exception could generate “billions of dollars” in foreign investment and help secure Australia’s position in the AI race.
The Productivity Commission says it’s open to considering a text and data mining exception to copyright, with Mr Albanese refusing to rule out such a change, sparking outrage among writers, artists and musicians.
The exception would allow tech companies to use work protected by copyright law – including books, songs and podcasts, now and into the future – and feed them into their AI machines so they can learn to be more human.
When asked about Australia’s plans to regulate AI, Mr Altman said he would respect different countries’ laws but there was competition among governments. “Different countries are going to try different approaches to AI regulation,” he said. “One thing we hear from leaders around the world is that almost everybody wants to make sure AI thrives in their country.
“We will respect different countries’ laws, but what we hear from world leaders is we need to figure out how to make sure AI thrives and does particularly well in our country.”
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said the government was “invested in the success of Australia’s creative industries and public interest journalism” but did not rule out introducing a text and data mining exception.
Mr Farquhar said Australia’s copyright laws were holding the country back in the AI race and relaxing the rules could “unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment”.
“Australia’s copyright laws are out of sync with the rest of the world. The US and Europe have exemptions for fair use (and) for text and data mining. The Australian Law Commission in 2014 recommended changes, and (the) Productivity Commission in 2016 recommended changes, (yet) we remain an outlier when it comes to copyright.
“So this is a barrier to AI companies who want to train or host their models in Australia, and this is even a barrier to Australian companies who want to build their models here.”
Mr Farquhar said he understood the concerns copyright holders had about changing laws.
“People who spend a lot of time creating the work, whether it’s a journalist or an author or a movie producer or a movie star, deserve to be compensated for the work that they’ve done.
“The way the fair use exemptions work overseas is that the use has to be new and not basically taking away dollars from the people that created that work. And so yes, if AI and large language models can reproduce that exact article or reproduce that exact same book, that is a problem.
“In most cases, you can’t do that with AI. They put protections around that today. I think we do benefit from new and novel ways of putting works together.”
Mr Altman said ChatGPT-5 was a significant leap forward on OpenAI’s previous models, saying it made ChatGPT-4o appear “antiquated”.
New features included the ability to generate high-quality code, improve writing, handle complex software development, while lowering the hallucination (or made-up answer) rate.
“This is a major upgrade and a pretty significant step towards AGI (artificial general intelligence),” Mr Altman said.
“GPT-5 is really the first time that one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, like a PhD level expert, anything. And not only that, it can do stuff for you. One of the coolest things it can do is write good, instantaneous software. This idea of software on demand is going to be one of the defining features of the GPT-5 era.
“This is like a superpower now that I think would have been pretty much unimaginable at any previous point in human history.”
While it can generate code and create software “on demand”, Mr Altman was adamant it would not replace software coders. This is despite Tom Gruber, the co-creator of Apple’s Siri, saying it could signal the end of “geeks” getting rich from their coding prowess.
“We have badly underestimated the amount of additional software that the world has demand for,” Mr Altman said. “As we have tools that let software engineers be way more productive, and the cost of creating software comes down, we will find out that the world wants way more software, and there’s more jobs for that – even if the nature of the job, of what it means to be a software engineer, changes.
“The ability to figure out what we want computers to do and get computers to do those things will be one of the most core use cases of AI.
“AI will use coding as the way to create new interfaces, as a way to share richer experiences as a way for people to collaborate with each other.
“What we’re going to find out is there’s just effectively unlimited demand for software, and that it’ll be a huge unlock for economic growth and opportunity in the world.”
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