Watering Down Australia’s AI Copyright Laws Threatens Writers’ Livelihoods
Australia’s Productivity Commission is considering an exemption for text and data mining in the Copyright Act. This move risks turning our creative industries into an extractive field dominated by tech giants, potentially putting writers out of business.
From the hum of typewriters in 1987 Brisbane newsrooms to typing on modern Macs, storytelling has always been a deeply human process. Stories capture the truth of society—from exposing corruption to highlighting personal tragedies. But when these stories are scraped by AI systems, their essence is lost.
What Does “Scraping” Stories Mean?
Scraping means dragging or pulling content from its source to feed AI models. In Silicon Valley, this process treats our stories as disposable data rather than valuable human experiences. The result? AI-generated content that feels flat, homogenized, and detached from diverse realities.
Generative AI tends to reflect dominant narratives—young, cisgender, able-bodied people in urban settings—ignoring voices from marginalized communities or remote areas. This erodes the rich, messy fabric of human experience that writers bring to life.
The Real Cost of AI’s “Content Harvest”
Big tech companies protect their AI code with copyright while freely taking Australian writers’ work to train their models. Meta, for instance, has already harvested thousands of Australian creatives’ content. Now, by weakening copyright laws, the government risks handing over our creative assets for free.
An analogy from The Australia Institute compares this to driving a rental car without paying and then making it legal. For writers, it’s more like stripping a piece of their soul, feeding it into a machine, and getting back something unrecognizable.
Innovation or Exploitation?
The argument for easing copyright restrictions is that it will fuel innovation. But the Copyright Act’s purpose is to protect creative effort. Undermining it devalues writers’ work and livelihoods.
We face a neo-colonial-style extraction: tech giants take Australian content, train their AI, then sell it back. The promised $116 billion economic gain over the next decade sounds appealing, but it’s worth questioning at what cost.
Productivity and Humanity
True productivity isn’t just about technology. It’s improved by treating workers humanely, minimizing distractions, and fostering real skills like touch-typing. We are not machines, and our society thrives on human stories, not automated outputs.
Writing, music, and images are the foundation of human progress. Protecting these creative forms from being commodified by AI companies is crucial if we want to keep culture alive and evolving.
Writers must stand firm. The costs of watering down copyright protections could be the loss of our stories, our voices, and our livelihoods.
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