At least 15 million videos have been snatched by tech companies. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. W hen Jon Peters uploaded his first video to YouTube in 2010, he had no idea where it would lead. He was a professional woodworker running a small business who decided to film himself making a dining table with some old legs he had found in a barn. It turned out that people liked his candid style, and as he posted more videos, a fan base began to grow.

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has put the issue of compensation for content producers back on the table. Generative AI offers undeniable benefits but raises familiar fears tied to disruptive technologies. Legal battles are already emerging worldwide, with intellectual property owners and AI developers clashing over rights. Alongside these legal and ethical concerns lies the economic question: how should revenues generated by AI be fairly distributed? Individual contributions to AI-generated outputs are often too complex to quantify, making it difficult to apply the principle of proportional remuneration, which holds that payment for an individual work is tied to the revenue it generates.

Tech companies Amazon, Google and Meta have been criticised by a Senate select committee inquiry for being especially vague over how they used Australian data to train their powerful artificial intelligence products. Labor senator Tony Sheldon, the inquiry's chair, was frustrated by the multinationals' refusal to answer direct questions about their use of Australians' private and personal information. "Watching Amazon, Meta, and Google dodge questions during the hearings was like sitting through a cheap magic trick – plenty of hand-waving, a puff of smoke, and nothing to show for it in the end," Sheldon said in a statement, after releasing the final report of the inquiry on Tuesday. He called the tech companies "pirates" that were "pillaging our culture, data, and creativity for their gain while leaving Australians empty-handed." The report found some general-purpose AI models – such as OpenAI's GPT, Meta's Llama and Google's Gemini – should automatically default to a "high risk" category, and be subjected to mandated transparency and accountability requirements.

In brief Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay, made headlines for claiming an AI chatbot was due to defend a man in an upcoming court hearing, but has pulled out of the stunt. Browder runs a consumer rights startup that was originally built to help people appeal parking tickets more easily, and has since grown with the aim of building "the world's first robot lawyer." He wanted to show AI could replace expensive human lawyers, using language models to form legal arguments. Earlier this month he claimed to have convinced a man to wear headphones during a court case and recite the output of an AI chatbot in a court hearing scheduled to take place over Zoom. But his behavior caught the attention of prosecutors irked by his reckless antics.

Inflection AI, the start-up launched earlier this month by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, has poached artificial intelligence gurus from Google and Meta, according to CNBC analysis. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection's aim is to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers. When the company was launched, the only three team members that were made public were Suleyman, Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karén Simonyan. However, others have now joined the fold. Heinrich Kuttler left his research engineering manager role at Meta AI in London this month to become a member of the founding team at Inflection, working on the technical side of the business, according to his LinkedIn page.