Open letter: Australia's creators are not a tech subsidy
We are Australia’s songwriters, recording artists, authors, journalists, photographers, producers, visual artists, composers, screenwriters, playwrights and creative industry businesses. We make the songs that end up on every streaming platform, the photographs that document our lives, the books and scripts and artworks that define our culture, the TV and film productions that light up our screens, and the stories that uncover and tell the truth about our nation. Our work is the fuel that powers the AI economy. Without it there are no large language models, no AI products of any kind. All of it has been fed into AI systems without asking us and without paying us.
The companies now valued in the hundreds of billions want a hand-out, a free-for-all for our labour and intellectual property. We call on the Australian Government to commit to the future of creativity in this country and not to trade it away. Our stories and our creativity is how Australia knows itself, how we speak to the world, and how the world comes to know us.
Last year the Government rejected a proposal that would let AI companies use our work for free. That was the right call. The Australian public is asking technology platforms to be accountable, to the environment, to the community, and to our culture. Consent and remuneration are how that accountability works for creators. Not a discretionary arrangement on the platform's terms. The right to say yes or no, and to be paid when the answer is yes.
The same companies that failed to win that exception are back with a different slogan. They are proposing new funds and new ideas cooked up in tech company boardrooms. This is the same play with a different slogan, and the Australian cultural sector is still being asked to pick up the bill.
The goal is to permanently sever creators from the work they make. The song written at 2am. The photograph that took a day to compose. The story researched for six months. The novel that took years. What looks like a payment offer is the removal of the only protection that says a creator's work is theirs.
What the AI companies want instead is a system where they decide what to pay and when. No rights. No negotiation. No recourse. They want to go from asking permission to asking for gratitude.
Australia holds something no other country possesses: more than sixty thousand years of First Nations culture. Those songs, stories, images and languages are living cultural heritage. Any framework that weakens the protection of creative work puts that heritage at risk of being absorbed into AI systems in ways that are extractive, disrespectful and irreversible.
Australia's cultural and creative sector contribute over $67 billion to the economy and grows faster than most of the economy. It comprises more than 95,700 businesses and employs hundreds of thousands of Australians in real jobs and sustained careers. Undermining the legal protections that make these careers would be an economic decision with consequences felt for decades.
The next National Cultural Policy is an opportunity to build a global creative powerhouse. That future can only be built on the foundation that gives creators the economic security to keep making work. Asking Australian creators to quietly absorb the legal liability of tech companies before they float on the stock market, it would be the permanent transfer of Australian stories to the wealthiest corporations in human history.
Undermine the rights that make creative careers possible and you don’t just hurt the current generation of artists. You gut the pipeline for the generations that come.
The time for fake solutions concocted in Silicon Valley boardrooms is over.
We want consent, and to be paid for our work through the legal system that exists to make that happen. Not through a fund a tech company can shut down when it stops being useful to them. We are asking the Government to bring the platforms to the table for local licensing agreements and to hold the line until they come.
Without creative content, there are no large language models.
There are no AI products.
We want PERMISSION and PAYMENT for our creative content.
