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News and Advocacy

Artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities and efficiencies, but also poses significant risks to the creative industries. It is imperative that the development and use of generative AI is carefully regulated. The rights of human creators must be safeguarded and their contributions to the development of AI technologies acknowledged and compensated.

Generative AI models are trained by ingesting huge corpuses of ‘data’ – known as training datasets or inputs – which include copyright works such as books, journals, essays, and articles. The quality of the outputs is reliant on the quality of the training datasets or inputs. It is undisputed that the works in the training datasets have been copied without permission from, or payment to, creators. What’s more, this technology risks displacing, and diminishing the value of, authors’ and illustrators’ labour.

We know that generative AI will reduce supplementary sources of income and skills-building opportunities for authors and artists such as copywriting and concepting art jobs. We are also concerned that inferior AI-generated content will flood the market, making discoverability harder for professional writers and lowering quality for consumers.

Given the very low earnings of authors (average of $18,200 per year), even a small disruption to income may mean the permanent loss of many professional writers, resulting in a contraction of authentic Australian voices, of unique Australian perspective and a future skills gap. 

We support the development of new technology, but this development must be done ethically. The ASA position is that the laws and policies regulating AI should ensure authorisation, fair compensation, and transparency.

The ASA welcomed the Australian Government’s recognition that AI must be regulated to ensure its safe and responsible development and use, and we believe that industry must act transparently and be guided by ethical and human-centred principles. 

Authorisation and compensation

AI developers must be required to seek authorisation from writers and illustrators to use their works to train generative AI, and to fairly compensate the creators who grant such authorisation. 

Copyright owners earn a living from licensing their work and must share in the financial rewards derived from using their intellectual property. It is axiomatic that any business relying on a third party’s intellectual property to develop a new product or service must seek a license from the owner of that intellectual property. To ignore this is to ignore the cost of creating cultural material, treat authors’ intellectual work as a free public commodity, disregard copyright laws, and undercut the living wage of professional writers and artists. 

Market-based solutions, such as direct or collective licensing, remain an effective mechanism to support new forms of exploitation. Licensing honours an author’s right to exploit their works  – or refuse to do so – and ensures that authors are appropriately remunerated.

Transparency and trustworthiness

Transparency is crucial in ensuring the safe, ethical, and fair development of AI technologies. Generative AI companies must be required to be transparent about both inputs and outputs. 

Inputs: AI developers must be required to disclose copyright works used for AI training, and for what purpose. There is global precedent for this – the Draft EU AI ACT, for instance, requires foundation model AI developers to publish summaries of copyright material used for AI training. This is important to avoid serious and well-documented issues of bias, to appropriately acknowledge the use of original content and to let creators know if their rights have been infringed. 

Outputs: AI-generated products should be labelled as such. It is essential for educational, research and cultural institutions – as well as consumers – to be able to easily identify AI-generated works. AI developers and users must be required to declare when a work is wholly or partially AI-generated.  

Authors play an irreplaceable role in our society; entertaining, challenging, educating, and inspiring countless readers, as well as fuelling the broader creative industries. Human creativity and human knowledge is essential to a healthy, resilient, democratic, and modern society. New technologies ought to serve our community and unlock new opportunities for our creative industries. If regulated appropriately, AI represents a chance to support Australian authors, artists and publishers rather than displace our creators to the detriment of our nation’s unique cultural landscape.

Read our full policy recommendations here.

What is the ASA asking for?

The ASA is asking that Government introduce a new mandatory Code of Conduct which governs the relationships between AI companies and Australian copyright owners of works ingested for AI training. Codes of Conduct are prescribed across a range of industries in Australia, in order to provide frameworks and minimum standards for ethical conduct.

The Code of Conduct ought to apply to all AI companies operating in the Australian market. It should be designed to arrest the information asymmetry and profound unequal bargaining power between creators and Big Tech and to bring about voluntary licensing solutions.

The Code must require:

a.  Transparency: Currently, the AI economy is slowed and frustrated by opaqueness. With mandated transparency, licensing can flow and consumers can be informed. Reasonable obligations include:

    • an obligation to disclose training data and where it was sourced;
    • an obligation to disclose to users when an AI system is being used to
      interact with them;
    • an obligation to disclose to users when content is AI generated, by clear labelling or watermarking.

b. Negotiated permission: Multinational AI companies carrying on business in Australia must negotiate with copyright owners for permission to use their work for AI training purposes in the future, whether by direct licence or voluntary collective licence. This would act as a signal from the Government that creators’ rights cannot be bypassed and that licensing is the mechanism that will deliver desirable content to AI companies and economic sustainability to creators. (Local AI startups are already required to licence copyrighted works for AI training under the Copyright Act.)

c. Protections for individual creators: Licensing revenue must actually flow to the original authors whose copyright work has been exploited. Minimum percentage entitlements to authors must be established upfront so that any intermediary – such as a collecting society or publisher – is required to deliver the full benefit of new licensing revenue to creators, subject only to a small agency fee.

d. Past use: With respect to Australian copyright material which has already been ingested to train AI models offshore, and for which consent was not sought, the relevant AI company must pay to each relevant Australian copyright owner fair compensation which continues for as long as the work remains ingested in the AI model.

e. Compliance with First Nations Protocols: The Code must include an obligation on AI developers to observe Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Protocols.

To support the Code, significant penalties for non-compliance should be included.

Read our guidelines for creators

In our guidelines you’ll find advice on protecting your rights, for both traditional publishing and self-publishing, as well as information about the risks of using AI. These guidelines will be updated as industry best practice and standards evolve.
LEARN MORE

What is the ASA doing?

 

 

 

 

  • August: Spearheaded media attention on creators’ strong opposition to the Productivity Commission’s proposal for a copyright exception for AI training

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • June: Joined other creator and rightsholder organisations in writing to the Attorney General, the Minister for Communications, the Minister for the Arts, and the Minister for Industry and Science to call for support of robust copyright framework

 

 

 

  • September – October: Spearheaded media attention on the Australian authors whose pirated books were included in the Books3 dataset used for AI training

 

What can you do?

Write to your local MP about the theft of your work and the risks to your livelihood and Australian culture if Australia’s copyright laws are watered down to benefit Big Tech.

Sign the global statement on AI training.

Send a letter to AI companies telling them they do not have the right to use your work; the US Authors Guild has made a template available.

If you haven’t already, consider joining the ASA. The ASA’s lobbying efforts in Canberra would not be possible without our members’ support. The more voters we represent, the more likely our voice will be heard by the politicians with the power to make change.

BECOME A MEMBER

Alternatively, if you’re already a member or prefer to contribute without joining the ASA, you can donate to our Endowment Fund. Donations to the Endowment Fund go directly towards supporting the ASA to lobby and campaign for the rights and professional interests of authors and illustrators.

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