Leaked letters and closed-door talks with PM: Media bosses’ AI fight

3 months ago 24

Australia’s media bosses are directly lobbying Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the threat artificial intelligence poses to news outlets, uniting with authors, musicians and artists to slam a proposal to waive copyright laws for multibillion-dollar AI companies.

The prospect of large language models such as ChatGPT scraping articles, songs and art without paying creators burst into the spotlight on Wednesday after the government’s think tank, the Productivity Commission, proposed a copyright exemption for AI firms training their models.

A letter from Australia’s top media firms and creative bodies, sent to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland on July 11 and obtained by this masthead, vowed to fight any move to weaken copyright protections, opening a fresh battle between local media outlets and foreign technology companies.

Nine chief executive Matt Stanton took the media’s fears directly to Albanese in private talks last month, as Labor tries to balance its agenda to rein in digital behemoths against the spectre of retaliation from the Trump administration against countries that regulate US tech giants.

The media companies’ concern centres on the way companies such as Google are reconstituting information from publishers and presenting it as AI answers to search queries, which one study found resulted in up to 80 per cent fewer views of underlying articles.

Stanton argued weakening copyright protections to allow AI firms to legally obtain Australian data – which has already largely happened due to it being a legal grey area – would amount to legalising theft.

“They don’t care for permission, they ignore direct requests to stop and are now actively campaigning our politicians to make this theft a legal and acceptable practice,” Stanton told this masthead, which Nine owns.

“To even contemplate making this behaviour legal is beyond comprehension. Yet that is the risk presented to us if our investment in Australian journalists and local news reporting is rendered worthless because these generative AI platforms can simply take it.”

“If Australian journalism is swiped into submission it is our democracy, our identity as Australians and our own voice as a people that is at risk.”

A united front of news bosses met with Communications Minister Annika Wells and Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino on Tuesday. They included Stanton, News Corp chief Michael Miller, Seven West Media’s Jeff Howard, the ABC’s Hugh Marks, and Guardian Australia’s Lenore Taylor. Those outlets were all contacted for comment.

Michael Miller, executive chair of News Corp Australasia, left, with Prime Minister and Anthony Albanese and Daily Telegraph editor Ben English during the election campaign in April.

The group is also pushing Labor to get moving on its promised incentive scheme to charge tech giants such as Meta for Australian news shared on social media and search platforms.

The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has refused to pay media companies under existing legislation and suggested it would remove all news content if it was pushed by the government.

But multiple sources familiar with the talks, who requested anonymity because they were private, said the outlets were mulling a request for the government to intervene and help them strike commercial deals with AI firms. Such a move would only come after the conclusion of talks over the incentive scheme, the sources stressed.

The Trump administration, whose allies include tech moguls such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, has expressed concern about charging digital platforms for news. This masthead reported in March that Labor delayed implementation of the scheme over worries about US retaliation, but Albanese has publicly committed to proceeding with it.

In a report outlining a potential $200 billion AI-driven boost to the Australian economy, the Productivity Commission said AI models required large amounts of data and suggested exempting “text and data mining” from copyright restrictions, which has occurred in other countries.

Minister for Industry and Innovation Tim Ayres said Labor had “no plans” to amend copyright laws. Rowland said any changes to copyright rules “must consider the impacts on Australia’s creative, content and news media sectors”.

As well as scraping news content, AI tools also allow users to recreate the styles of artists, musicians and authors, sometimes yielding almost identical final results to copyrighted works that have taken years of effort to create.

The July 11 letter, which is co-signed by the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Recording Industry Association and the National Association for the Visual Arts, reads: “This proposal would allow these platforms to use the copyrighted content of Australian companies and creatives without seeking permission or … remuneration.

“While we recognise the potential benefits of AI, we are deeply concerned about the implications of such an exemption on Australia’s cultural, social, and economic sovereignty.”

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said Labor’s language on the proposal was “wishy-washy” and emphasised it was “not appropriate for big tech to steal the work of Australian artists, musicians, creators, news media and journalism”.

Releasing yearly results on Wednesday, News Corp global chief executive Robert Thomson said his firm was trying to do content deals with AI firms.

“Take the example of President Trump. He has written many successful books, in particular The Art of the Deal,” Thomson said.

“Is it right that his books should be consumed by an AI engine which then profits from his thoughts by cannibalising his concepts, thus undermining future sales of his book? Suddenly, The Art of the Deal has become The Art of the Steal.”

Scott Farquhar, co-founder of software company Atlassian, last week demanded an overhaul of Australia’s copyright rules, claiming they were lagging comparable countries and that creating exemptions to train AI language models “could unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment.”

Google has strongly rejected studies showing click-through rates declining after the introduction of AI summaries, saying they used poor methodologies.