Australians owe Scott Farquhar a vote of thanks. When the Atlassian co-founder and freshly minted chair of the local tech lobby fronted the National Press Club recently, he articulated the industry’s claim on the nation with rare honesty.
The T-shirt wearing billionaire shared his log cabin story about a 12-year-old who naively predicted the internet, Amazon and the mass automation of work. But it was when he pivoted to the Tech Council of Australia’s talking points that things got real.
According to the Tech Council, AI will deliver $115bn in annual productivity (or about $4,300 per person), rubbery figures generated by industry-commissioned research based on estimates on hours saved with no regard for jobs lost, the distribution of the promised dividend benefit or how the profits will flow.
In return for this ill-defined bounty, Farquhar says our government will need to allow the tech industry to do three things: build a data and text mining exemption to copyright law, rapidly scale data centre infrastructure and allow foreign companies to use these centres without regard for local laws. This is a proposition that demands closer scrutiny.
The use of copyrighted content to train AI has been a burning issue since 2023 when a massive data dredge saw more than 190,000 authors (including me) have our works plundered without our consent to train AI. Musicians and artists too have had their work scraped and repurposed.
This theft has been critical in training the large language models to portray something approaching empathy. It has also allowed paid users to take this stolen content and ape creators, devaluing and diminishing their work in the process. Nick Cave has described this as “replication as travesty”, noting “songs arise out of suffering … data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing.”
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The sense of grievance among creators over the erasure of culture is wide and deep. A wave of creators from Peter Garrett to Tina Arena, Anna Funder and Trent Dalton have determined this is the moment to take a stand.
It is not just the performers; journalists, academics, voiceover and visual artists are all being replaced by shittier but cheaper automated products built on the theft of their labour, undermining the integrity of their work and will ultimately take their jobs.
Like fossil fuels, what is being extracted and consumed is the sum of our accumulated history. It goes from metaphor to literal when it comes to the second plank of Farquhar’s pitch: massive spending on industrial infrastructure to accommodate AI.
The Tech Council sees Australia’s future prosperity tied to the rapid development of the energy-hungry and water-thirsty data centres that the industry requires to power their rosy vision of the future, one where thousands of short-term jobs are created to build the centres that then will run largely autonomously. No mention that…
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