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 into Australia and protecting the legal rights of writers, musicians, and other creators.
• The core dispute is whether AI companies should be allowed to train their systems on copyrighted material without asking, and without paying.

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

She is far from alone.

Australia's creative community, writers, musicians, visual artists, is pushing the federal government to hold the line on copyright law, the set of legal rules that says 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, images, and other content 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 might read thousands of books 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, the warehouse-scale facilities full of specialised computers that run AI services, mean jobs, infrastructure spending, and tax revenue. That is real, and Labor MPs who represent regional seats are paying attention.

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

Prime Minister Albanese's speech this week is expected to sketch out where his government sits on all of this. The Guardian reported on the deep split inside Labor over how to balance those 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, the quality of what AI systems learn from shrinks over time. That affects everyone who types a question into a chatbot.

One practical thing worth knowing: if you create anything, writing, art, music, code, check whether the AI services you use explain in plain terms how your inputs are stored or used for training. Most platforms bury this in settings. It takes about two minutes to switch off, and it is worth doing.