Hollywood increasingly demanding AI rights on Australian creatives’ work, sparking fears of job loss and replacement

It comes as artificial intelligence developers race to get their hands on more and more data to train algorithms.

Sydney-based film score composer Antony Partos. Picture: John Feder / The Australian.

Hollywood bosses are in high-stakes negotiations for the right to feed Australian creatives’ work into artificial intelligence algorithms, raising fears in the local ­industry of replacement and job loss.

It is part of a broader trend where rapidly improving AI has unlocked greater than previously thought economic value in this kind of intellectual property.

Sydney-based film composer Antony Partos – credited with scores in films and TV shows such as Animal Kingdom, Rake, and The Slap – said he has had increasingly tense conversations seeking promises from US production companies that they would obtain his permission before feeding his work into generative AI models.

“For a composer, one’s work is a little bit like giving birth to a child and then handing it over to a stranger – not knowing if it’s going to end up in a slave labour camp!” Partos said.

Australian Writers Guild chief executive Claire Pullen – whose organisation represents stage, screen, and audio writers – said similar AI concerns were the most common issues members raised with her.

“Negotiating between creatives on one hand and production companies and streamers on the other is increasingly high stakes,” she said. “Creatives want to preserve the value of their work and the income they earn via royalties, while companies are rushing to exploit the possibility that AI may allow them to divert income from creatives to themselves.”

The problem traces back to the proliferation of work-for-hire contracts, she said.

As US streaming services came to dominate the market, they often brought with them contracts where Australian creatives would have to provide the intellectual property, not just exclusive rights, to their work.

The rapid pace of generative AI progress – which can already create convincing-sounding music, film scripts, and more – has raised the potential value of high-quality intellectual property, as AI developers race to secure more data to train their algorithms.

Some companies that own this kind of data appear to be working on agreements with AI developers to that end.

Partos recently had tense negotiations with US streaming companies looking for promises they'd seek his explicit permission before ingesting his work into AI. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

News Corp (the publisher of The Weekend Australian) was at an “advanced stage” with talks with AI companies about use of its content, chief executive Robert Thomson said earlier this year.

Late last year, The New York Times sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, saying it had engaged in negotiations with the AI developer to receive “fair value for the use of [The New York Times’] content”. Social media websites like Reddit and X have imposed heavier pricing for use of interfaces which could be used to scrape their data.

In the meantime, Partos is worried about the ramifications of these kinds of IP-shifting contracts on younger, up-and-coming, Australian creatives.

“It’s becoming more and more the norm,” he said. “There’s a general erosion of IP in Australia. There’s no way that up-and-coming composers could have bargaining power in these negotiations.

“An artist’s music, paintings, or verse has an intrinsic signature. When this gets copied by another person, there are legal ramifications. When this gets used via AI learning, it is going to be very difficult to legally unscramble that egg.”

Last year, the Writers Guild of America extracted from Hollywood concessions about the use of AI following a months-long strike.