Copyright Agency welcomes Parliamentary report on Adopting AI
November 27, 2024
The latest inquiry into the adoption of AI in Australia has voiced strong support for Australian creators and called out the ‘unprecedented theft’ of their work by offshore AI developers.
On 26 November, the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence released its final report. The Committee was established to ‘inquire into and report on the opportunities and impacts for Australia arising out of the uptake of AI technologies in Australia’. It released an interim report in October (here), focussing on issues relating to democracy.
You can see the final report here.
The Copyright Agency was pleased to see the following recommendations which are essential for the responsible and ethical adoption of AI:
Recommendation 8: That the Australian Government continue to consult with creative workers, rightsholders and their representative organisations through the CAIRG [Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group] on appropriate solutions to the unprecedented theft of their work by multinational tech companies operating within Australia.
Recommendation 9: That the Australian Government require the developers of AI products to be transparent about the use of copyrighted works in their training datasets, and that the use of such works is appropriately licensed and paid for.
Recommendation 10: That the Australian Government urgently undertake further consultation with the creative industry to consider an appropriate mechanism to ensure fair remuneration is paid to creators for commercial AI-generated outputs based on copyrighted material used to train AI systems.
These recommendations align with the position that Copyright Agency, together with others in the creative industries, have been putting to the Government:
- The current Australian copyright framework is fit for purpose for AI-related activities that occur in Australia and does not need to be amended (e.g. it enables licensing arrangements that support AI development and deployment in Australia, and also support Australia’s creative industries).
- The Government should introduce a new law that would compensate Australians whose works have been used for training AI models offshore (such as Large Language Models), where the training output (e.g. language model) is used for products and services available in Australia.
The Committee was scathing about the justifications put forward by multinational tech companies for not paying Australian creators, and for lack of transparency:
4.194 The notion put forward by Google, Amazon and Meta—that the theft of Australian content is actually for the greater good because it ensures the representation of Australian culture in AI-generated outputs—is farcical. Big tech companies are not investing billions of dollars in AI as a philanthropic exercise, but because of the enormous commercial potential that it represents. If the platforms are interested in supporting Australian creators, they should begin by fairly licencing their work in line with Australia’s existing copyright framework.
4.195 This hypocrisy was best highlighted by a comment made by Google’s Product Director for Responsible AI, Ms Tulsee Doshi, at the committee’s hearing on 16 August 2024, at which she was asked why Google is refusing to be transparent about its training data. Ms Doshi responded: ‘we need to always make sure that we’re balancing the needs and privacy of our users and also recognising the importance of protecting IP and information that contributes to industry competitiveness.’ In the same breath, Google says that it cannot be transparent about the copyrighted data it has taken to train its AI products, because it needs to protect its own IP.