CAMERON MILNER: AI tech bros want creative work for free, gifting our cultural legacy is short-sighted

The AI tech bros want our best musicians, writers, artists and journalists to work for free.

It’s a brazen case of daylight robbery and they want our Government to be a willing accomplice.

The AI public relations strategy is based entirely on FOMO.

If you think Australia is safe, just look to the UK Labour Government of Sir Keir Starmer, which is actively legislating in favour of big tech and its insatiable desire for legal larceny. Sir Keir has raised the prospect that the UK may somehow miss out on the AI tech boom unless they allow unfettered access to Britain’s intellectual property.

That’s about as logical as saying you can cure homelessness by taking your family home and giving it someone on the street for their perpetual use for free.

But it’s worse than a bank heist or common assault and robbery. At least in those crimes, it’s clear who the bad guy is. AI firms want politicians to give them cover and an air of appropriateness by saying such an act of theft is somehow in the national interest.

Sir Keir is attempting to hand over the works of Banksy, Sir Elton John and J K Rowling so corporations can data mine that intellectual property for their own sole benefit, without any compensation for the creators.

The Productivity Commission last week released a report urging Australia to do the same.

The politicians will all point to social media bans for under-16s as proof of their bona fides in standing up to Big Tech.

Well, Big Tech and every parent of a kid knows just how easily that’s going to be circumvented. It’s about as plausible as the argument that smoking warnings on cigarettes stopped teenage smoking in the 1980s

Anthony Albanese’s wet lettuce leaf crackdown on the social media giants is about as believable as $275 off your power bill or his claim that all you need is your Medicare card to see a GP.

While big tech cries foul over losing a supposed battle, they are set on winning the war. A war to give them our society’s complete back catalogue of creative endeavours, without having to pay for it.

A generation ago politicians — especially Labor politicians — lived in mortal fear of what the Murdoch press would say of them.

Pre-internet, the papers were seen as the major portal between politicians and voters.

Then came social media which was seen as the great democratisation of content.

Only it wasn’t. It became yet another pay-per-view platform with algorithms that influenced what voters, especially those under 40, were seeing on their feeds.

Sure, the conservatives plundered Facebook’s trove of social network data through the infamous Cambridge Analytica, but it’s Labor and the Left more broadly that has mastered the use of the social media through silly memes and pictures of Albo tucking into a democracy sausage.

As much as Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd have railed against the Murdoch press, a lot less is said about the clearly much greater influence of Facebook, X, Google and even the Chinese government-backed Tik Tok on our elections.

Every campaigner knows that you can’t possibly reach who you want to reach now without these corporations’ blessing. Not everyone can do a Trump and establish their own Truth Social.

This is the whip hand of Big Tech and it’s why they have every intention of bending Albanese to give than free access to copyright-protected data and intellectual property.

They’ve already enlisted Starmer. Albo is their next target of influence.

Each of the big social media groups has an AI arm waiting to pillage ravenously without fear of penalty. And they want their industrial-scale theft protected by the law.

So, they’ll cop a meaningless ban on those under-16 formally accessing their platforms, so long they win the war on data.

The UK is a salutary lesson. Despite Sir Elton John, Dua Lipa and Sir Paul McCartney decrying Labour’s legislation, Starmer rammed it through the House of Commons. It shows the real political muscle being flexed by Big Tech.

And to what end? So, the great joy of listening to, seeing or reading what another human being has created can be replicated by a machine? And after all it’s just a rehash, a remaking of someone else’s creativity. In order for AI to plagiarise, it had to be created first. AI might be a very good likeness, but it will only ever be a copy.

As a nation, we decide not to use Uighur slaves to make cheap clothes. We have labour rights and environmental laws that make us less productive than miners in Russia, but does that make us any less a great nation?

Likewise, we’ve got to defend our intellectual property rights.

Big Tech might only be able to get rich by authorised theft. But what we should be celebrating is what it took to create all that valuable data in the first place.

It was created with protections for the writers, painters, image makers, lyricists and composers that are actually part of our nation’s great past and even better future.

If it’s FOMO driving the debate, then maybe it should actually be the fear of missing out on genuine creative human endeavour that should be exercising out national leadership.

Instead, they are on bended knees to Big Tech cravenly wanting to hold onto electoral power, to keep the gates to voters’ feeds open.

That’s why Big Tech are waging a war on creatives and think they’ve got the politicians exactly where their predictive algorithm needs them to be.

A generation ago, voters and politicians needed stand up to Big Oil and Big Tobacco. Today’s challenge is to collectively stare down the vested interests of Big Tech.