Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Productivity Commission has recommended that the government pause their plans to regulate artificial intelligence and even suggested that AI should be allowed to train on copyrighted material for free. Of course companies like OpenAI, which made over $10 billion last year, apparently couldn't possibly afford to pay the artists and writers whose work fuels their profits! Not only is it expensive, but it's hard. Documents from a US court case involving Meta revealed the AI giant viewed licensing training material as 'incredibly slow' and 'unreasonably expensive'. Why would you do that when you can just plug a clanker into the Library Genesis project, a collection of pirated books and academic papers that have literally trillions of man-hours of creative work at its unfleshed fingertips?

The ABC reported that former Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar echoed this at the National Press Club, arguing a text and data mining exception could 'unlock billions of dollars of investment in Australia'. Another Meta document revealed its chatbots were permitted to 'engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual'. This section was quickly deleted after Reuters exposed it, but apparently the real danger here is that regulating AI might scare off investors in Australia.

At some point, we have to decide where the line is. Where must the abundance agenda stop? What do we as a country value more than gross domestic product? Art has to be one of these things because art is truth. But the only truth both the AIs reshaping our world and the maladjusted techbro oligarchs controlling them recognise is No. 1.