A potential deal with the government would allow international tech companies to mine the creative work of Australian musicians. Some of the prime minister’s favourite artists told the Guardian how they feel about it
Creatives sound alarm on copyright as Pocock calls $50bn datacentre proposal ‘ultimate dirty deal’
Big tech companies are asking for Australian copyright laws to be watered down, to allow them to scrape Australian output – including journalism, music and books – in order to improve their AI models.
Guardian Australia this week reported on an industry proposal under which companies would commit more than $50bn in investment in datacentres and set up a $350m fund to compensate creatives in exchange for weaker copyright laws. Senator David Pocock has described it as the “ultimate dirty deal”.
The Albanese government has insisted it has no plans to weaken copyright protections, after ruling out the potential text and data mining exemption last year – but creatives are so
Lanarkshire datacentre run by renewables and creating thousands of jobs not achievable by 2030, Guardian investigation finds
Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise
‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre
The Guardian has examined government plans to build Britain’s AI infrastructure for the future, finding some of these to be, in the words of one source, at best unclear and at worst “complete bunk”.
The plans in question are for AI growth zones, which are supposed to be regions where the government supports companies to build massive AI datacentre complexes, of 500MW or greater. These could be bigger than any now operating in the UK.
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US companies hoping to make fortunes from AI want the creative product of our country to be available to them for free, or for peanuts. Words fail me
Last week I went to Canberra with a group of other people who live by selling our creative work. We make the books, songs, artwork, First Nations artworks, films, music and TV shows that delight and entertain us, reveal us to ourselves as humans, and connect us as Australians.
The works we make are our property. They are ours to sell. In my case, this involves licensing my books to publishers around the world, who produce and distribute them for money, 8-12% of which comes back to me as royalties. This is how copyright works. It is the law, in the same way as Torrens Title is the law for real estate property. Without copyright, no one would make anything. Why would you, if it could immediately be stolen from you? But this is what has happened. All my books have been ingested into AI computer programs without my consent and without payment
Exclusive: Foreign secretary warns of combined risks of AI, climate crisis, irregular migration and foreign interference
Artificial intelligence poses a “Hiroshima”-style risk to humanity if governments do not agree to curb how it is developed, the foreign secretary has warned.
Yvette Cooper urged countries, including the US and China, to agree international rules for AI, telling the Guardian she believes the issue will dominate foreign policy over the next two years.
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The Ratepayer Protection Act could set a precedent for holding all large energy consumers accountable for infrastructure costs, impacting various industries.
The post Ratepayer Protection Act would force AI companies to fund their own energy upgrades, and crypto miners should pay attention appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
As AI moves from model development to production inference, compute demand is accelerating and shifting toward continuously operating AI factories that generate tokens at scale. This shift requires access to large‑scale, multi‑tenant accelerated computing that can come online quickly, stay highly utilized and support the economics of token‑scale AI services. Emerging AI companies historically have […]
Cloudflare is giving AI companies until September 15 to separate web crawlers used for search from those used for AI training and agents, or risk being blocked by default on many publisher sites.
Proposal has been put to cabinet to allow AI companies to mine content, in exchange for investment and $350m fund to compensate artists, sources say
Creatives are demanding fresh assurances from the Albanese government that it won’t water down copyright laws under a potential deal with tech giants to attract more than $50bn worth of datacentre investment in exchange for a $350m-a-year fund for artists.
Guardian Australia has been told an industry proposal has been presented to cabinet that would grant AI companies special exemptions to mine creative content.
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