Australians have little appetite for letting artificial intelligence companies feed off the nation’s songs, scripts, books and artwork without asking first. A new survey reported by RadioInfo Australia found that only 9% of people would be willing to gift Australian creative work to AI companies for training, a figure that lays bare just how isolated the technology sector has become in one of the country’s most contentious policy debates.
The number is striking precisely because it is so small. When barely one in eleven people supports an idea, it stops being a matter of fine balance and becomes something close to a consensus against. The finding arrives as the creative industries, the technology lobby and the federal government circle a single unresolved question: on what terms, if any, should generative AI systems be allowed to learn from the work of Australian creators.
How we got here
The fight has been building for more than a year. Generative models that write, compose and illustrate are only as good as the material they are trained on, and the richest training material is exactly the sort of copyrighted work that musicians, authors, illustrators and screen professionals spend their careers producing. Overseas, that reality has already spilled into the courts, with major rights holders suing AI developers over the scraping of books, lyrics and images.
In Australia the flashpoint has been the Productivity Commission, which earlier floated the idea of a text and data mining exception to copyright law. In plain terms, such an exception would carve out space for AI developers to train their systems on copyrighted material without first securing a licence, on the reasoning that easier access to data would lift national productivity and help local firms keep pace with offshore rivals. The creative sector read it very differently, as a plan to legalise the mass use of their life’s work without consent or payment.
The 9% figure sits squarely in the middle of that argument. It suggests the Productivity Commission’s efficiency case, whatever its economic merits, has not won the public. People may happily use AI tools, but asking them to simply donate the country’s cultural output to the companies building those tools is a different proposition entirely, and one most Australians appear to reject outright.
Two ways of seeing it
For the creative industries, the survey is vindication. Bodies representing songwriters, authors and performers have argued for months that any framework built on an opt-out model, where creators must discover their work has been taken and then object, inverts the basic logic of copyright. Their position is that consent should come first, remuneration should follow, and that a thriving licensing market is perfectly capable of supplying AI developers with data on fair terms. A result showing that nine in ten Australians would not freely hand over local work strengthens the case that the public shares those instincts rather than viewing creators as obstacles to progress.
The technology and productivity camp sees a harder trade-off. Their argument is that training data is the raw material of a strategically important industry, that overly restrictive rules will simply push model development offshore to jurisdictions with looser regimes, and that Australia risks becoming a consumer of foreign AI while its own developers are starved of the data they need to compete. On this view, a narrow and carefully bounded exception is less a theft than a pragmatic accommodation to how the technology actually works. The survey does not resolve that tension so much as sharpen it, because it shows the political cost of being seen to side with machines over makers is now considerable.
What it means for Australia
The stakes here are unusually concrete. The creative and cultural economy is worth tens of billions of dollars to the country and employs hundreds of thousands of people, from session musicians and novelists to the sprawling screen production workforce. Decisions made in Canberra about AI and copyright will shape whether that economy is compensated when its output trains the next generation of models, or whether value flows out to a handful of largely foreign technology giants.
The mood captured by the survey also lines up with a run of recent developments. The music industry’s peak awards body has moved to keep fully AI-generated songs off its charts, academics and legal scholars have been drawing up frameworks to shield Australian artists from exploitation, and streaming platforms have begun purging AI-generated tracks from curated playlists. Taken together, these are not isolated gestures. They point to a creative sector that has decided to set its own guardrails rather than wait for legislation, and a public that appears to be behind it.
There is a sovereignty dimension too. Australia has spent the past two years talking up the idea of a local AI capability, from data centres to home-grown models, and some in the industry argue that a domestic training-data market, properly licensed, could be part of that story rather than a casualty of it. If creators and developers can strike commercial deals, the argument runs, Australia gets both a protected cultural base and a supply of ethically sourced data, a combination that could become a genuine point of difference internationally.
What’s next
The immediate question is how the federal government responds to the Productivity Commission’s thinking, and whether any copyright exception survives contact with a public that so plainly dislikes the giveaway framing. Expect the creative sector to wield figures like the 9% result hard in submissions and lobbying, and expect the technology industry to counter with warnings about competitiveness and investment flight.
What seems increasingly settled is the direction of travel. The debate is shifting from whether AI companies should pay for creative work to how that payment and consent should be structured, which licensing bodies should administer it, and how transparency about training data can be enforced. A survey finding that only 9% of Australians would donate their culture for nothing does not write that policy by itself, but it tells politicians exactly where the public is standing, and it is not alongside the scrapers.
Sources: RadioInfo Australia.
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