Australia's creatives versus AI companies: the copyright fight heading to Canberra

Key points

• Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is scheduled to deliver a major speech on AI policy this week.
• Author Anna Funder appeared at Parliament House in May 2025 to accuse technology companies of taking her work without consent or payment.
• Labor MPs are divided between welcoming large data centre investment and protecting the legal rights of writers and other creators.
• The core dispute is whether AI companies should be allowed to train their systems on copyrighted material without asking or paying.

Anna Funder, the author of Stasiland, walked into Parliament House earlier this month and called herself a "victim of crime." Her point was blunt: technology companies have, in her phrase, "hoovered up" the literary work of writers like her to train their AI systems. Nobody asked. Nobody paid.

She isn't alone.

Australia's creative community is pushing the federal government to hold the line on copyright law, the legal rules that say you cannot copy someone else's work without permission. AI companies train their models, the large software systems that power tools like ChatGPT, by feeding them enormous amounts of text scraped from the internet. Much of that content belongs to someone.

The companies argue that scraping published material for AI training should be treated as a permitted use, similar to how a student reads widely to learn. Many Australian MPs disagree, and so do the artists.

Who actually wins if Australia changes its copyright rules?

Neither side, at least not cleanly. The tech industry is dangling a significant carrot: big data centres, warehouse-scale facilities full of specialised computers that run AI services, mean jobs and tax revenue. That's real, and Labor MPs representing regional seats are paying attention.

But weakening copyright hands AI companies a free pass to use creative work as raw material, with no payment to the people who made it. For a freelance illustrator or a novelist whose backlist is their retirement plan, that's not abstract. It's money out of their pocket.

We've been watching this tension build: our earlier story on a No. 1 Australian radio hit that experts suspect AI produced shows how quickly the question of who made what is becoming impossible to ignore.

Prime Minister Albanese's speech this week is expected to sketch out where his government sits. The Guardian reported on the deep split inside Labor over how to balance these competing pressures.

For ordinary Australians who use AI tools daily, the outcome matters in a quiet way. If creators stop making work because it gets absorbed for free, what AI systems learn from shrinks. That affects everyone who types a question into a chatbot.

Should you worry about your own content?

If you create anything, writing, art, music, check whether the AI services you use explain how your inputs are stored or used for training. Most platforms bury this in settings. It takes about two minutes to switch off.