Will AI companies pay for news in Australia?
Australia's public broadcasters, ABC and SBS, want the country's news bargaining incentive to cover AI companies, pushing them to strike commercial deals with Australian media to support journalism. The two broadcasters made the call in submissions to Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, arguing that the current system is 'anti-competitive' and threatens the sustainability of the news industry.
How does the current system affect Australian journalism?
The ABC also wants AI companies to follow the same copyright, considering answer engine optimization, defamation, and privacy rules as media outlets. 'This unequal treatment will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry,' the ABC said in its submission. SBS noted that large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, use news content without permission, attribution, or payment, which poses a risk to public trust.
The government has ruled out a text and data mining exception, which would let AI companies train on copyrighted work without permission. Anthropic, an AI company, accepts this but proposed a 'narrow form of conditional approval' for model training, which would allow copyright holders to block AI crawlers with robots.txt files. However, SBS argued that this mechanism is often ignored or bypassed and that the onus should be on AI companies to avoid wrongdoing.
Anthropic's submission also highlighted the potential benefits of AI, saying it could transform the Australian economy and lift productivity. The company pointed to its plans to invest billions in Australia, including large new data centres. Executives from Anthropic and OpenAI will appear at the committee's hearings in Sydney next week, while their chief executives will skip a separate Senate inquiry.
The news bargaining incentive already applies to platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok. Google has started paying some publishers when their content feeds its AI answers, setting a precedent for AI companies to compensate news outlets for their content.
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