Aussie creatives pen open letter calling on government to protect artists’ rights from AI companies

Representatives from APRA, ARIA, and the Australian Society of Authors demand “right to say yes or no” to being used to train AI, and “to be paid when the answer is yes”. A raft of industry bodies representing Australian creatives and artists have written an open letter to the Australian government calling for greater protections from AI companies looking to use their content to train advanced AI models. “The companies now valued in the hundreds of billions want a hand-out, a free-for-all for our labour and intellectual property,” the letter says. “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.” The letter praises the government for rejecting a 2025 proposal to let AI companies use Australian art for free, calling it “the right call”. However, the letter warns that AI companies are trying again, under a “different slogan”. “They are proposing new funds and new ideas cooked up in tech company boardrooms,” the letter warns. “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.” The letter also notes that Australia’s First Nations history and culture is also under threat. “Those songs, stories, images and languages are living cultural heritage,” the letter says. “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.” Several Australian artists have already called out the use of their content by AI companies without their consent, particularly after the creation of an online tool to track the use of creative content by US media outlet The Atlantic. Speaking to the AAP, Paul Dempsey of Australian band Something for Kate, said he found the situation “frustrating”. “Every negotiated agreement and contract I’ve ever gone into in my career with whatever entity or record label is all just rendered useless,” Dempsey said. “An artist’s ability to negotiate fair terms for the use of their content is just being ripped away from them.”