Tech companies have devalued the work of creative industries for years. The latest iteration of this is their insistence the AI models they plan to make lots of money from need the labour of all of human creation for free in perpetuity. It’s just surprising that the Productivity Commission appears to have bought into the argument – and caught the Australian government off-guard.
The Productivity Commission’s view on AI trained on the copyrighted works of others without compensation, published Wednesday, is that the horse has already bolted for big tech companies – that providing a text and data mining (TDM) exception in copyright law would not change much, but should be worth considering.
