The prime minister is trying to untangle the copyright knot. But this is about much more than intellectual property
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If Anthony Albanese has a spiritual home it would be somewhere between the old Sando and the Enmore theatre in that pocket of Sydney’s inner west where the traffic never flows and the people of Grayndler still rule the streets in all their messy diversity.
It was here that the Whitlams first gigged and sang of blowing up the pokies, part of the bohemian milieu from which Hot Albo emerged as he built a political base that would take him all the way to the Lodge. The band would famously be presented an Aria in 1998 by Gough, a consummation of the cultural union between Labor and the creative sector that traced its origins to the early 70s when Little Patti belted out It’s Time in Bankstown town hall.
This alliance saw a generation of performers sign on to Keating’s bigger vision of Australia. The Midnight Oil frontman, Pete Garrett, made it official when he transitioned from rock icon to Rudd frontbencher. The creative sector leaned into our first female leader with gusto before a government led by a genuine Australian music fan guided the nation out of the lockdown that nearly killed off the creative sector for good.
This long-term partnership is now at the crossroads, with the prime minister weighing one of his most wicked challenges as he seeks to position Australia at the frontier of an artificial intelligence billed by some as the great leap forward, by others as a highway to hell.
The AI hyper-scaler Anthropic, now seeking a market valuation of $1.5tn, has pitched to base its training models in Australia, with renewable datacentres exporting tokens to the world creating a new green industry unimagined even a few years ago. The government earnestly believes the best way Australia can both harness and control this emergent technology is to embed ourselves deep in the production chain, positioning ourselves as the Saudis of global data. For a country looking for a post-mining economic plan, it is indeed a vision splendid.
But there is a competing narrative that is just as compelling: the models have been ruthlessly trained on stolen property. They have scraped books, recordings and videos without the consent of their creators, pillaging the canon of academic papers and the output of news sites. Now they are seeking retrospective absolution. To anchor the models here, they offer government a Faustian pact: relax copyright laws that would create global liability for their misuse of protected artistic work. Creators respond this would turn Australia into a global haven for data-washing, the Cayman Islands of copyright.
While the government is working assiduously to untangle the copyright knot, the truth is this is about more than intellectual property. Beyond what goes into the models is what comes out, automated mimicry of the things artists spent their life mastering, what Nick Cave has described as “replication as travesty”.
And it’s not just creatives who are feeling this way. Breakthroughs in mathematics sparked real concerns that in rushing to an answer, the ancient discipline will lose its bearings, with no path to understanding what is created to the point where it is questionable whether it is even knowledge. Educators too are sounding the alarm on the erosion of cognitive skills as machines mark the work of machines and students are left to fill in the prompts, robbed of the opportunity to actually learn. Psychologists and therapists worry about forming relationships with chatbots. Pope Leo worries about the essence of our very humanity.
All this is coming to a head, accelerated by a growing awareness that the scale-out of datacentres is adding to demands for energy and water, while the Reserve Bank governor says rapid capital injections are placing pressure on inflation for all of us.
Copyright sits at the eye of this perfect political storm.
Creatives are a tough political crowd. By definition they are not rational beings who will be swayed by a spreadsheet. Nor are they passive bystanders who will just shut up and play. They are emotional and principled with the means to amplify their own voices. And their simmering rage at the prospect of a sell-out is made worse by the PM’s promise of protection in his much-vaunted AI speech in July.
At the very minimum, they expect the right to control their work and receive meaningful reparation for the crimes committed. But this should be the beginning not the end of any settlement; if we want creativity to flourish we should all demand clear labelling and active promotion of human work and a shared benefit from any value the models create. Call it a cultural accord, a nod to the agreement Bob Hawke struck with unions to help Australia navigate the last great global disruption.
The truth is our creative industries were struggling before the AI apocalypse. While the Enmore continues to host established acts, the Sando is where bands got their start literally playing on the bar. It became a mini-golf arcade and more recently a social darts club.
Rather than a last stand, this should be a much-needed catalyst for change. And I for one am grateful our creators have five decades of moral pressure to exert on Labor to get AI right and not just let it roll over the top of all us. I’m also glad we have a leader who recognises the legitimacy of these voices. What emerges should be the ultimate act of co-creation that promotes and nurtures culture as a critical marker of our democracy.
Peter Lewis is non-executive chair of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that undertook qualitative research for Labor in the last federal election. He is the host of the weekly podcast Burning Platforms. His columns are accredited Proudly Human
