The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, will confirm the decision on Monday, shutting the door on the proposal floated by the Productivity Commission and backed by tech companies. The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, will confirm the decision on Monday, shutting the door on the proposal floated by the Productivity Commission and backed by tech companies. The Albanese government has explicitly ruled out handing tech companies free rein to mine creative content to train their artificial intelligence models, after a fierce backlash from authors and arts and media groups. The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, will confirm the decision on Monday, shutting the door on a contentious proposal floated by the Productivity Commission and backed by tech companies. "Australian creatives are not only world class, but they are also the lifeblood of Australian culture, and we must ensure the right legal protections are in place," Rowland said.

Chief global affairs officer of company behind ChatGPT tells Sydney audience'we are going to be in Australia, one way or the other' Fri 17 Oct 2025 03.33 EDTLast modified on Fri 17 Oct 2025 03.35 EDT "No we are going to be in Australia, one way or the other." And now the internet claims many people don't even care. What is going on?! | First Dog on the Moon "We will engage in either country - we will find ways to work with those who want to build up big frontier models and have robust ecosystems, or those who just want to have much more narrowly defined AI," he said. "We will work with them under either scenario, regardless." "This is the nature of how technology works. Innovations come along, and then societies adapt to those innovations," he said.

Arts, creative and media groups have demanded the government rule out allowing big tech companies to take Australian content to train their artificial intelligence models, with concerns such a shift would "sell out" Australian workers and lead to "rampant theft" of intellectual property. "It is not appropriate for big tech to steal the work of Australian artists, musicians, creators, news media, journalism, and use it for their own ends without paying for it," Ley said on Wednesday. In an interim report on "harnessing data and digital technology", the Productivity Commission set out proposals for how tech, including AI, could be regulated and treated in Australia, suggesting it could boost productivity by between 0.5% and 13% over the next decade, adding up to 116bn to Australia's GDP. The commission suggested several possible remedies, including expanding licensing schemes, or an exemption for "text and data mining" and expanding the existing fair dealing rules, which it said existed in other countries. The latter suggestion prompted fierce pushback from arts, creative and media companies, which raised alarm their work could be left open for massively wealthy tech companies to use – without compensation or payment – to train AI models.

Digital disruption has the potential to threaten 40 per cent of jobs over the next 10 to 15 years as automation and machine learning shake up the economy, according to a Productivity Commission report out today. In research entitled Digital Disruption: What do governments need to do?, the Commission warned that governments and regulators need to prepare for changing times as "disruption" moves beyond Uber and Air BnB. Productivity Commission chairman Peter Harris said developing disruptive technologies of machine intelligence and automation will gradually change economies. "There's little doubt that in some sectors there will be dislocation of labour and dislocation of capital. "It's not just a cost to employees, it will be a cost to certain businesses as well," Mr Harris told The World Today. "Things like 3D printing are going to have an impact.