KATE EMERY: Productivity Commission wants to sacrifice creatives so tech giants can cash in

Until this week I’d assumed the only people whose heartrate spiked while reading a Productivity Commission report were Canberra bureaucrats, for whom Performance Benchmarking of Australian Business Regulation: Planning, Zoning and Development Assessments was their 50 Shades of Grey.

Then I read the commission’s interim report into harnessing data and digital technology and felt my adrenaline spike like I was an antelope on the Serengeti that had just spotted the tuft of a lion’s tail in the long grass.

It wasn’t fear I felt but white-hot rage.

Because how dare they?

How dare the commission float reducing the value of Australia’s creative industries to power big tech’s multi-billion-dollar plagiarism machines?

How dare the commission suggest that artists who want to be paid for their work are standing in the way of progress?

And how dare the commission propose that the country’s writers, filmmakers and musicians simply lie down in the path of the AI monolith that is coming for them like the boulder came for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What the commission has floated is a text and data mining exception for Australia’s Copyright Act that would allow AI companies to “mine” books, songs and films for free to build the next ChatGPT.

None of the artists who created the work would receive so much as the $19.99 it might cost one of these companies to pick up, say, a copy of the book or album they want to steal.

As a journalist and an author, whose books have already been pirated and used to train Meta’s AI monster, I have no claim to objectivity here.

But you don’t need to be an artist to value it. If you like watching movies or TV, listening to music or reading books, this proposal — and at this stage it is just an interim report in search of feedback — should make you just as enraged.

AI runs on data. Generative AI — programs like Midjourney or ChatGPT that can create pictures or words — are essentially giant plagiarism machines.

Without data sets to “train” these programs, these huge companies are left with very, very expensive copy machines.

The commission has questioned whether Australian artists should just hand over their work — our “data sets” if you will — in part because it’s already happening illegally anyway, so what’s the point?

It claims AI could unlock more than $100 billion for the Australian economy, which begs the question: for who?

Not for the artists, for whom producing creative work will become increasingly untenable.

Not for people who enjoy watching movies, listening to music and reading books, who can look forward to a diet of AI-generated slop with nothing new to say because — once more for the cheap seats — all generative AI can do is plagiarise.

The biggest beneficiaries will be the tech titans who want to use this tech to add an extra couple of zeroes to their net worth.

It’s the equivalent of letting Mark Zuckerberg break into your house and help himself to your flat screen.

No offence, mate, but have you tried paying for it?