News boss Michael Miller says AI journalism theft will hurt all Australians

The Australian head of media giant News Corp has warned society will suffer unless artificial intelligence companies are prevented from stealing journalism from mainstream media outlets.

Michael Miller, News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman, on Wednesday warned about a dystopian future in which there will be fewer journalists to hold the powerful to account and access to information will be guarded by machines.

“Our industry is buckling under the weight of the four seismic waves of disruption, and you know who will suffer the most? The Australian people,” he told the Melbourne Press Club. “AI firms are now using bots to scrape all the material that we are publishing online. A new Big Steal.”

He cited the case of Trent Dalton, the bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, who saw material from his books stolen to train AI language models.

Mr Miller suggested that big tech receives far less scrutiny from the Federal Government than embattled phone company Optus, following the triple-0 call failures that led to three deaths.

“Optus is, rightly, being held to public account and condemnation over the triple-0 failure that led to people losing their lives,” he said. “How can there be one set of rules for a company like Optus while the tech companies refuse our rules?

“In my fight for a successful future for professional journalism, I am not asking for handouts. I am calling on the Federal Government to ensure a level playing field for all.”

Mr Miller’s speech was in response to recommendations from the Productivity Commission two months ago that big tech companies should be exempted from the Copyright Act to train large language models similar to ChatGPT.

He suggested The Tech Council of Australia was lobbying the Federal Government to amend copyright laws as a matter of urgency, after chairman Scott Farquhar, a co-founder of workplace software giant Atlassian, told the National Press Club in July that “fixing” the Copyright Act would “unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment into Australia”.

“How is it that the tech lobby has put so little effort into quantifying the benefits to back their claim when the cost they are seeking to impose on us is so high and so quantifiable?” Mr Miller said.

“They say Australia . . . would serve as an ideal regional hub for Asia-Pacific cloud services due to its proximity to Asian markets. Their first ask is for complete surrender and their fallback position is a new set of rules written just for them. Our response must be no.”

News Corp, founded by billionaire Rupert Murdoch and now chaired by his eldest son, Lachlan, has signed deals with ChatGPT owner OpenAI to use its content. But the US-based company is suing San Francisco start-up Perplexity AI for allegedly stealing content from The New York Post and Dow Jones.

Been here before

The rise of AI is being likened to the rise of the internet during the 1990s, which saw newspaper content pirated and published online, in breach of copyright.

“We all lived through the first Big Steal when our ideas, work and creative content was hoovered up by the internet and now there are those who expect us to stand aside and let it happen all over again,” Mr Miller said.

“We must not. Some will disagree with me and say the era that is now unfolding is just structural change or an incremental digital disintermediation — a new normal.

“Believe me … it is not. Make no mistake, we are at the dawn of the next new digital landscape and yet we are being challenged to accept another wave of publicly endorsed theft, and an assault on our privacy, our identities … and our livelihoods.”

Mr Miller criticised Victoria’s Labor Government for banning its own use of print advertising in News Corp mastheads, along with Nine’s The Age and The Australian Financial Review.

“It would be fair to say that while the government has tried, their efforts — at times — are ineffective when it comes to supporting Australian media,” he said.

State Government departments and agencies like the National Gallery, the Transport Accident Commission and Visit Victoria are instead advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook.

“This absurdity denies Victorians important information and unfairly favours the platforms, and at the same time in 2021-22 they spent over $75 million advertising on digital and social media,” Mr Miller said.

In an unlikely alliance, Mr Miller is joining forces with authors and artists to voice concern about AI, a week after authors Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder, and musicians Jack River and Paul Dempsey told a Senate hearing in Canberra that Australian artists could be wiped out within a decade by AI.

He wants Anthony Albanese’s government to ensure it enforces the News Media Bargaining Incentive, announced in December last year, to make large digital platforms enter into commercial arrangements with news publishers, which they did in 2021 when the Coalition was last in power.

“The government must enact now the News Media Bargaining Incentive, which has not advanced, and remains unimplemented just under a year after being announced,” Mr Miller said.