<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/16/scott-farquhar-atlassian-ai-copyright-australian-culture-resources-democracy-4300-no-thanks-tech-bros-opinion>
"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.”
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 there is already a shortage of tradies to build
houses and that the people who will be looking for jobs are the one in two
young graduates whose entry paths AI will close."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
