Tech giants are prepared to offer media outlets and artists the chance to opt out from a contentious plan to give artificial intelligence firms free access to Australian content as a delegation of authors and musicians descends on Canberra to fight the prospect of their work being mined and mimicked.
While authors including Thomas Kenneally and Anna Funder and musicians including rapper Briggs will appear at Tuesday’s parliamentary inquiry into AI and the arts, Open AI and the Tech Council of Australia have not yet confirmed they will attend.
Thomas Kenneally will argue against the AI copyright proposal at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday. Credit: Oscar Colman
Debate on the proposal was sparked in August when the Productivity Commission suggested a “text and data mining” exemption from copyright restrictions as local AI players try to build an Australian industry.
Keneally told the Australian Financial Review last month that the Productivity Commission did not care about Australian culture, arguing the copyright proposal amounted to “life or death stuff”.
“That’s the way writers think of this. For the ones who know it’s on, it is ‘to the barricades’,” he said.
The Tech Council of Australia has championed the exemption from copyright, but its chief executive, Damian Kassabgi, told this masthead the sector was open to a system in which creators could block their work from data mining and paywalled news articles could be automatically protected.
“The TCA is hopeful Australia can find a path forward on copyright that allows AI training to take place here while also including appropriate protections for creators who make a living from their work,” he said.
“There are already tech solutions that allow creators to opt out of having their data used in training. A combination of opt-out technologies and content deals, for example, could allow creators to choose when their content is used to train AI models and to benefit from that use.”
The Tech Council claims YouTube contributed more than $970 million to the Australian economy last year while Netflix, it said, has spent $1 billion on Australian content.
