Sydney inland artists unite against AI proposal

Prime minister Albanese is facing growing discontent within his own electorate as creatives push back against the federal government’s proposal to allow AI companies to scrape everything Australians create online.

Albanese’s seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner west is home to more than 3,000 cultural and creative businesses, and 10% of its workers are employed in cultural and creative fields – compared with 4.2% nationally. He has held it on a safe margin for three decades, and has spoken of its high representation of live music, theatre and artist spaces with pride.But now, as Labor considers giving AI companies access to Australian creatives’ works by default as it pursues a compromise with US tech giants, locals are reacting with dismay.

Labor is mulling over the copyright changes in a suite of reforms surrounding AI, including datacentres, energy and the economy. While Albanese has promised “the strongest possible protection”, warning it would be “theft” if creatives weren’t paid for their work, creative industries are alarmed that AI companies have requested a weakening of copyright law to train their models using Australian material. Some AI companies have said making licensing agreements under existing copyright law would be too difficult, while Anthropic has suggested an “opt-out” model which would allow it to scrape content unless a rights holder objected, prompting warnings from Coalition senators and the recording industry that this could amount to an acquisition of property by the government.

Labor’s proposals were leaked in September as senior personnel from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, met Labor ministers and warned that Australia’s copyright laws were preventing the company from training models locally.

The federal government’s draft laws are expected by the end of the year, with consideration in parliament due in 2027. Artists from the area are saying that AI could be “good for humanity” but is now an “extraction industry mining for profit for the few”. Some also state that AI has been useful in their practice, but having to opt out is “outrageous”, and no one would post anything if free content can just be churned out by an AI machine.