Leaked letters and closed-door talks with PM: Media bosses' AI fight
The prospect of large language models such as ChatGPT scraping articles, songs and art without paying creators burst into the spotlight on Wednesday after the government's think tank, the Productivity Commission, proposed a copyright exemption for AI firms training their models.
A letter from Australia's top media firms and creative bodies, sent to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland on July 11 and obtained by this masthead, vowed to fight any move to weaken copyright protections, opening a fresh battle between local media outlets and foreign technology companies.
Nine chief executive Matt Stanton took the media's fears directly to Albanese in private talks last month, as Labor tries to balance its agenda to rein in digital behemoths against the spectre of retaliation from the Trump administration against countries that regulate US tech giants.
The media companies' concern centres on the way companies such as Google are reconstituting information from publishers and presenting it as AI answers to search queries, which one study found resulted in up to 80 per cent fewer views of underlying articles.
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Stanton argued weakening copyright protections to allow AI firms to legally obtain Australian data – which has already largely happened due to it being a legal grey area – would amount to legalising theft.
'They don't care for permission, they ignore direct requests to stop and are now actively campaigning our politicians to make this theft a legal and acceptable practice,' Stanton told this masthead, which Nine owns.
'To even contemplate making this behaviour legal is beyond comprehension. Yet that is the risk presented to us if our investment in Australian journalists and local news reporting is rendered worthless because these generative AI platforms can simply take it.'
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