Media union calls for AI taxes for firms scraping Australian content
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The news: The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has called on Labor to consider taxing AI companies for the use of Australian content to train their models, as part of a renewed plea for broader AI regulation.
The context: The union, as part of work ahead of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Economic Reform Roundtable, has released the results of a survey which uncovered widespread concern among its members over the use of their work to train AI models, and the threat the technology poses to jobs.
Some 94% of the 700 people surveyed said they should be paid by large AI firms, such as Meta and OpenAI, for the work that is used to train their models. Only 3% said they had consented and been compensated for the use of their work in training AI models.
The vast majority of those polled by the union said the government needed to intervene, in line with calls from media and entertainment industry groups around the world.
The issue has shot to prominence over the last two years. Media and entertainment companies have at once rushed to deploy the technology across their organisations, while trying to figure out how to get paid for the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.
In Australia, generative AI is used to produce journalism at News Corp, while the ABC is soon expected to deploy its own AI tool, ABC Assist. Other global newsrooms, including Bloomberg News, are also using the technology.
What they said: “We know that Australian voices, music and artwork have been scraped and faked, that ChatGPT is substituting the work of our journalists, and that AI-generated clone hosts have been used for radio programs — with no disclosure to audiences,” MEAA chief executive Erin Madeley said in a statement.
“This amounts to the unsanctioned, unregulated, and untaxed mining of Australia’s creative resources. Just like offshore miners are required to pay taxed and royalties to extract our natural resources, so too should the technology titans that are systematically mining the original works of our creative and media workers to train their … AI models.”
The source: MEAA media release
