ABC and SBS want AI companies to pay for Australian news

Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, want the country’s news bargaining incentive to cover AI companies. That would push them to strike commercial deals with Australian media to support journalism. The two broadcasters made the call in submissions to Parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

Josh Butler reported the submissions for the Guardian on Thursday. The ABC also wants AI companies to follow the same copyright, defamation and privacy rules as media outlets. It called the current system “anti-competitive”.

“This unequal treatment will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry,” the ABC said in its submission.

SBS said large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude use news content without permission, attribution or payment. That threatens the sustainability of the news industry and public trust, the broadcaster said.

Anthropic’s opt-out proposal

The government has ruled out a text and data mining exception, which would let AI companies train on copyrighted work without permission. Anthropic accepts that, it told the committee. Instead, it proposed a “narrow form of conditional approval” for model training, a request TNW reported in September.

Under its plan, copyright holders could block AI crawlers with robots.txt files, which tell bots which pages they may visit. Anthropic said it was “open” to supporting Australian creators.

SBS argued that this would not work.

“Robots.txt mechanisms are routinely ignored or bypassed,” SBS said, adding that “the onus should be on AI companies to avoid wrongdoing”.

Blocking new training bots also puts the burden of monitoring on rights holders, the broadcaster said.

‘Light and shade’

In its newly published submission, Anthropic said there was “light and shade” to AI. It said the technology could transform the Australian economy and lift productivity. It also warned of serious risks to national security, critical infrastructure and public safety. The company pointed to its plans to invest billions in Australia, including large new data centres.

Executives from Anthropic and OpenAI will appear at the committee’s hearings in Sydney next week. Their chief executives, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, will skip a separate Senate inquiry. OpenAI has apologised to Australia after its models accessed four government websites in June.

The news bargaining incentive already applies to platforms such as Facebook, Google and TikTok. Elsewhere, Google has started paying some publishers when their content feeds its AI answers.