A formidable coalition of Australian creators and book industry organisations attended a Senate Inquiry hearing yesterday to strongly oppose the Productivity Commission’s proposal for a text and data mining exception for AI training.

Representing the book industry were authors Anna Funder, Thomas Keneally, Caroline Overington, Sally Rippin, Professor Toby Walsh, and CEOs of the Australian Society of Authors and the Australian Publishers Association, Lucy Hayward and Patrizia di Biase-Dyson.

The authors detailed how their work had been used by overseas tech giants to train AI tools, without consent or compensation. Australian Children’s Laureate and Writing Australia Council member, Rippin, said ‘Earlier this year I discovered that 67 of my books were included in the pirated books dataset LibGen which some AI companies have reportedly used to train their AI tools. This is unacceptable. Some of the world’s wealthiest companies have used my life’s work without permission and without payment.’

Emphasising AI developers’ disregard for creators’ intellectual property rights, Keneally said, ‘It’s not copy-charity. It’s not copy-privilege. It’s not copy-indulgence. It’s copyright. And our right has been taken away by ignorant people who don’t realise what copyright is.’

Quoting his daughter, author Meg Keneally, he added, ‘This is not a victimless crime. You have stolen our early mornings and our late evenings. You’ve stolen the time that we in turn have stolen from our loved ones to make a book.’

Professor Walsh, an AI researcher and author, said about Big Tech’s use of copyright work for AI training, ‘It is not technically necessary for them to do this. It is only the commercial race that has encouraged them to skirt the law.’

Highlighting what is at stake if the government were to introduce a copyright exception for AI training, Funder told the Committee, ‘If Australia would like books to delight itself, to know itself, to be itself, and not a source of raw materials for American or Australian computer companies, we will need books. But without copyright, no one will write them.’

Overington agreed, saying that if we legitimise the theft of Australian authors’ work by Big Tech to train their AI tools, writers will lose the right to tell stories their way. She said, ‘Many of these writers are already so vulnerable. They earn very little … It is not, in my view, in Australia’s national interests to enrich these multinational companies at the cost of Australian writers, who are telling stories that contribute to our cultural life.’

Di Biase-Dyson noted that a copyright exception would also undermine publishers’ ability to invest in new Australian stories and voices.

‘Copyright is how creators earn a living, and it’s straightforward. If you want to use someone’s work you have to ask permission,’ Hayward said. ‘These companies do not need the financial assistance of a public policy intervention to make resources available to them for free.’

‘Creators aren’t anti-tech. This isn’t a story of authors vs. AI. This is an issue of fairness. The problem we need to address is bringing Big Tech to the table to respect creators’ work and to license it appropriately as they should have done, and know they should have done from the beginning.’

In a submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry, the ASA has called for the introduction of a mandatory Code of Conduct that will require AI developers, as a condition of doing business in Australia, to:

• disclose the copyright works which have been used to train AI models.
• pay ongoing fair compensation to Australian creators whose works have already been ingested – and from whom it is too late to seek consent – for as long as their work remains ingested in the models.
• ensure that any use of Australian copyright material to train AI models is subject to licensing arrangements.

Our sincere thanks to Anna Funder, Thomas Keneally, Caroline Overington, Sally Rippin, and Professor Toby Walsh for giving their time to speak up for creators.