Parliamentary committee recommends ‘laws to stop the theft of Australia’s creative and media work by AI developers’
A parliamentary committee has issued its final report recommending laws to stop the theft of Australian written and creative work by AI developers, and to ensure fair payment for work used in the training and development of these tools.
The Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence recommends the federal government implement laws to protect creative content from being stolen by tech giants in its final report, released on Wednesday.
“The committee has called out the farcical arguments of the big AI developers who claim to be acting in the public interest when in reality they are acting in their own self-interest at the expense of our vital creative and media sectors, said MEAA chief executive Erin Madeley.
The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance said it “welcomes the clear and unambiguous call” by the committee, and said the report paved the way for the government to introduce legislation for an AI Act.
“This report makes it clear that the best way the government can deal with the breadth and scale of the threats posed by AI is through the legislation of a comprehensive, economy-wide AI Act.”
MEAA said it welcomes the recommendation to force AI developers to be transparent about the use of copyrighted works in their training datasets, and that the use of such works is appropriately licenced and paid for, and the recommendation of a mechanism to ensure fair remuneration is paid to creators for commercial AI-generated outputs based on copyrighted material used to train their systems.
“In the months since the committee began its inquiries, we have seen more and more evidence come to light which suggests that the theft and exploitation of creative work has occurred at a much larger scale than previously thought putting into question the ongoing viability of rights and protections regimes that have governed the use of creative work for more than a century,” Madeley said.
“The impunity with which big AI developers have systematically scraped and stolen creative work shows us that copyright laws on their own are no longer fit for purpose to protect the rights and payments of creative and media workers.
“Critically, we have recently witnessed several million-dollar licencing deals between rightsholders and AI developers where workers have been entirely cut out. In these cases, workers received no benefit from the sale of their work and weren’t even asked for their permission.
“This practice is unacceptable: creative and media sector workers must share in any compensation arising from the sale of their work to AI companies and must always retain the right to opt-out.”
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