Australian author Anna Funder says AI platforms need to be held accountable for stealing creatives’ work

Writer Anna Funder swore she wasn’t doing her kid’s uni assignment.

But, for a bit of a lark, she wrote half a page of something about the topic, and as an experiment, her kid ran it through the AI checker. The program said the words, sentences and ideas Funder had crafted by her own hand was 73 per cent likely to have been written by AI.

How does something like this happen? It’s simple. AI companies have already stolen her – and millions of authors’ – work, ingested it into their large language models, compared her freshly written words and matched it to a pilfered tone and voice that exists in their system.

“The first fortunes of these tech companies were made by invading our privacy and stealing our private information to on-sell to advertisers, governments, bad actors or whoever, and the second trench is by stealing all our creative work,” Funder told The Nightly.

“It is grotesque.”

Funder is one of the prominent voices leading the charge against tech companies looting a hundred years of copyrighted creative work to feed their AI systems, which in turn then increases the value of those businesses into the trillions.

As one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors – her books Stasiland, Wifedom and All That I Am have won awards, sold loads of copies and, most significantly, captured the cultural conversation – Funder is someone with skin in the game.

But her advocacy not driven by self-interest. At the core of this conflict between artists and tech is the continued existence of human creativity.

“I have zero interest in a book ‘written’ by a machine,” Funder said. “The purpose of a novel is to have one human being representing what it is to be human from their point of view and from their character’s point of view as an act of communication with the reader.

“Some people think that creativity is a bit like sampling, that you can just gather a whole lot of stuff, stolen or not stolen, and stick it all together and it’ll be a song or a story. It just won’t be. It’ll be a collage or a mishmash.”

There’s a reason why AI companies stole books or journalism to train their models. They could have stopped at Reddit threads, emails and the detritus of the internet.

“The stuff of value has come from book because they have been edited, they’ve been checked and they’ve been written properly,” she said.

“If we want to continue to have those sorts of materials, they’re not going to be made by machines because machines are just going to be reproducing or sampling.

“We need humans to keep making them.”

It’s also humans that can look for the ideas, the stories and the people that aren’t topline in the written record, like Funder did in her works. Wifedom brings to the fore George Orwell’s wife, Eileen Blair, a clever woman whose life and contributions have been hidden from history and view.

AI will only regurgitate that which has come before, a homogenised, flattened facsimile of a version of art, culture and stories, as dictated by an algorithm which serves a particular industry’s profit agenda. Eileen Blair’s story would not have been found by AI.

In the face of that, human creativity, human curiosity and human actions can become a form of resistance.

Funder’s three major books were published over more than two decades, but there is a throughline that she didn’t recognise until recently.

“(They’re about) courage and conscience,” she said. “What really interests me, as it turns out, is courage and conscience in ordinary people. It’s the kind of thing that, in Australia, makes people run into the surf to save someone from a shark.

“But looking at it more in relation to really horrible political systems like the communism of East Germany or Nazism, or patriarchy, and looking at how we react, how humans duck and weave, and resist or collaborate in those circumstances.

“They’re questions for our time”.

There are great forces of political, social and economic change upon us, perhaps a new industrial age, and Funder admitted, like most of us, to being overwhelmed. It’s hard not to feel like an insignificant molecule, unable to affect the agendas of billionaires, corporate interests and those who abuse power against the common good.

But Funder is optimistic about everyday people. “We have more power than we think,” she said.

She cited the people in her book Stasiland, those who paid dearly for refusing to cooperate with the fascistic East German Stasi, and their morality that held firm.

“They were really made to suffer for their resistance and for refusing to betray, but something in them can be an example to the rest of us about not just going along with things because we’re told, for instance by the tech bros, that this is all inevitable.”

It’s not inevitable, Funder argued. AI as envisioned by the tech industry is a peculiarity, which means it can be dealt with, but the first thing to do is to be clear about what we’re facing.

One way to do that is to keep taking part in what she sees as a still-robust Australian public sphere, buttressed by our institutions in a way that the American context is not.

“People are very interested in ideas here,” Funder said.

“We don’t give ourselves enough credit for the fact that we are a place where there is a public square, there is public discourse. We should think ourselves as smarter than we do.”

She cited our public, constitutional and electoral systems, and our principles of fairness.

“We have this legacy of compulsory voting, preferential voting, an independent electoral commission, caps on companies essentially buying politicians, and we have Medicare.

“Medicare raises the level of human dignity and the freedom to speak truth to your employer, whereas in the US, your employer has you absolutely by the short and curlies because your healthcare depends on them keeping you employed.

“(The Americans) are so much less free than us, that we barely recognise it.”

Anna Funder is currently touring Australia with events in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne