AI companies overseas have committed what in their own words they describe as ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ taking copyright material – much of it from pirate websites – to train their generative AI models, which they are commercialising and charging all of us to use. Why did they do this? Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot cheaper to make ‘gazillions’ in Open AI’s words, if you don’t have to pay your essential suppliers. 

Far too late these companies have realised that the LLMs they’ve developed are Large Liability Machines. They are now subject to over 150 lawsuits in the US alone. These companies have licensed copyright material where they’ve judged the legal and commercial risks are too high – there are over 200 licensing deals for AI training to date. But where they think they can get away with it, they’re lobbying governments around the world to relax copyright protections so they can continue their extractive practices unimpeded, and extinguish liability for their poor conduct. 

We’ve heard a lot about tech’s ‘red lines’. No asking permission, no calling it a license, no liability. It gives the impression not so much of AI on Australia’s terms, as foreign corporations dictating what they get, how they get it, what it’s called, and which laws they can change, all for a gold coin donation. It doesn’t pass the pub test. 

We cannot be so indoctrinated by tech exceptionalism as to believe the largest companies on the planet cannot possibly obey our laws. We should be appalled by such a defeatist attitude. It’s not in Australia’s interests, and it doesn’t align with the government’s regulation of some of the same companies across social media, privacy, digital duty of care and other laws. If Ai developers’ business model relies on breaking our laws, then there is something wrong with their business model.

The government is not powerless to address the offshore problem. Don’t water down our copyright laws with an opt-out scheme or otherwise. Instead, uphold, enforce, and reinforce our copyright law. Clarify the importation provisions and introduce statutory damages. Give us the leverage we need to compel licensing in this jurisdiction, irrespective of where an AI model is trained.

Because the reality is these companies have shown they are bad faith actors, time and again. The Medicare hack is just one more in a long line of examples of this. These companies have no social licence for good reason.

As Microsoft said in an unsealed filing from one of the countless lawsuits, ‘Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time: It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’

How is the government going to face the world’s creators, if we upend copyright here? How is the government going to face Australian creators, and tell them we’ve removed the one bargaining chip they have – their rights to their work in this country? All to make Big AI more profitable.

There are no AI tools without creators’ work. Clever, creative, original thought is the irreplaceable fuel for generative AI. Authors know these companies represent an existential threat – their professional lives are being made harder by displacement of their work and dilution of the market. They are already feeling the pinch. If the government doesn’t redress the harm and right the balance, there’ll be no creative industries left to steal from.