GitHub's Australian AI warning
Australia has a developer gap and GitHub chief legal officer Shelley McKinley warns it could get even worse if the wrong regulatory settings are put in place.
The AI explosion of the past couple of years has made platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT household names. One of the fastest-moving parts of this revolution is in software development, with programmers increasingly relying on services like GitHub Copilot, which can generate functional computer code.
It’s an advancement that brings huge productivity improvements — as well as a host of legal issues on everything from copyright to user privacy. As chief legal officer at Microsoft-owned GitHub, Shelley McKinley has a front row seat to those live issues and the regulatory scrutiny that comes along with them, including in Australia.
The Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence is approaching a September deadline for finalising its report to parliament and expectations of government guardrails for high-risk AI are growing.
And with more than 100 million developers building on GitHub globally, including more than 1.57 million in Australia, McKinley is pushing for any regulation to be "pro-developer".
