Australia must work with other countries to protect artists amid AI boom, senior opposition senator says

Australia alone cannot protect the country’s content makers from data-ravenous artificial intelligence and must work with other countries, opposition finance spokesman James Paterson says.

The warning comes as artists sound the alarm over AI models feeding off their works to continue advancing.

AI itself cannot produce original content, so it must be trained using whatever humans have created.

It also scrapes as much data from as many sources as it can to answer queries, including news organisations.

The models are usually monetised by their big tech backers, such as OpenAI, Google and Meta, without compensation to people doing the heavy lifting.

Echoing Productivity Commission recommendations, Senator Paterson said on Thursday the answer was not more regulation.

“I think we need to be mindful of the fact that Australia is a medium power, that we’re not the main source of innovation and development in this industry, that most of these companies are headquartered overseas, either in Silicon Valley, or indeed in China, or elsewhere in the world, and our ability to regulate them is limited,” Senator Paterson told Sky News.

“I think it would be far better if we work with governments of aligned thinking to work on this collectively in a way that is enforceable against these companies, which are enormous and which have their own intellectual property which they can quickly move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to find the most attractive settings and the most attractive policy settings that allow them to flourish and to innovate.

“And if Australia just becomes a hostile jurisdiction to that, then we don’t win from that, we only lose from it.”

Coalitions arts spokesman Julian Leeser said tech giants should “pay fair compensation” if they want to profit from the work of Australians artists, musicians, creators and journalists.

“In the real world, we wouldn’t let someone use an artist’s work for commercial purposes without paying for it. The virtual world should be no different,” he said.

While he acknowledged AI is “important,” he urged balance.

“We want Australian cultural, arts and news media sectors to thrive, and there must be guardrails in place to ensure that can occur,” he said.

Australian rock legend Peter Garrett is among the most vocal Australian artists pushing for tighter rules on AI.

He said the idea of tech firms using his music to train AI without his consent was “horrifying” and called it a “massive breach of copyright”.

Garrett has also advocated for “robust laws to ensure copyright holders are adequately remunerated, licences applied and transparency around the actual processes used when a creator’s work is exploited”.

Australia has managed to strike deals with American tech titans to compensate media companies for content shared on their social media platforms, so there is precedent.

But AI is still very much an emerging technology and most governments and businesses have not worked out an economic road map for it.

To make matters more complex, non-Western countries have proven capable of producing competitive alternatives, such as China’s DeepSeek.

China is a notoriously difficult country to to get to enforce copyright.

In a report released this week, the Productivity Commission warned against taking a “heavy-handed” approach to AI regulation, saying to do so could stifle innovation and cause Australia to fall behind other countries.

Instead, it recommended making existing regulations fit-for-purpose.

That included plugging gaps around consumer protection, privacy, and copyright.

The commission said AI-specific regulation should only be considered as a “last resort” for specific use cases where existing laws were clearly insufficient to mitigate harms.

It also called for a pause on mandatory “guardrails” for high-risk AI until the reviews of existing regulations were complete.