Artists sing out as Australian songbook slurped by AI
Some of Australia’s best-known writers and artists are calling on the federal government not to grant copyright immunity to AI companies.
Musicians including Mark Seymour, William Barton, Paul Dempsey and Mahalia Barnes and writers including Anna Funder and Andy Griffiths meet at Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday.
The IT industry has pushed for text and data mining exemptions from copyright laws, which require artists’ consent and payment for the use of their creative works.
AI technology is trained on large amounts of data, and a dataset search tool recently created by US publication The Atlantic reveals that millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train the AI – a practice known as slurping.
The album includes numerous songs from the Australian songbook by names such as Nick Cave, Jimmy Barnes and Kylie Minogue.
Nicholas Pickard, of music licensing body APRA AMCOS, said IT companies could license these works under existing laws, but they were lobbying to change the rules instead.
“Canberra Airport is as busy as Central Station, there’s flight after flight… Open AI is coming, you’ve got Microsoft, Google and the Technology Council,” he said.
“So far we haven’t even knocked on the door of these platforms to explore what a licensing arrangement might look like.”
The federal government rejected changes to Australia’s existing copyright regime in October.
In June, independent senator David Pocock raised allegations in parliament that Labor was considering a new set of changes, but the government dismissed these claims as reckless speculation.
Approximately 300 commercial AI licensing agreements have been signed worldwide with content companies such as Conde Nast and Warner Music.
At the same time, around 270 lawsuits are pending against AI companies in various regions, but there are no copyright infringement cases registered against AI companies in Australian courts yet.
