Open AI has broken ranks with the Tech Council of Australia over copyright restrictions, declaring it is \u201cgoing to be in Australia, one way or the other\u201d.<\/p>\n
Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer of the artificial intelligence company responsible for ChatGPT<\/a>, gave a keynote address at SXSW Sydney on Friday, where he covered the geopolitics of AI, Australia\u2019s tech future \u2013 and the global debate around using copyrighted material to train large language models.<\/p>\n Scott Farquhar, the Tech Council chief executive and Atlassian co-founder, has previously said<\/a> Australian copyright law \u201churts a lot of investment of these companies in Australia\u201d.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n In August, it emerged the Productivity Commission was examining<\/a> whether technology firms should be exempt from copyright rules that stop companies mining text and data to train AI models.<\/p>\n But, when asked whether Australia could lose investment in AI development and datacentres if it didn\u2019t loosen its copyright laws to fair use, Lehane told the audience:<\/p>\n \u201cNo \u2026 we are going to be in Australia, one way or the other.\u201d<\/p>\n Lehane said countries generally chose one of two positions when it came to copyright restrictions and AI. One was to take a US-style fair use approach to copyright, allowing for the development of \u201cfrontier\u201d (highly advanced, large-scale) AI, while the other was to maintain a historic position on copyright, limiting AI\u2019s scope.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will engage in either country \u2013 we will find ways to work with those who want to build up big frontier models and have robust ecosystems, or those who just want to have much more narrowly defined AI,\u201d he said. \u201cWe will work with them under either scenario, regardless.\u201d<\/p>\n When questioned about Sora 2 \u2013 Open AI\u2019s new video-generating model \u2013 being launched and monetised before copyright use had been ironed out, he said the company was benefiting \u201ceveryone\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the nature of how technology works. Innovations come along, and then societies adapt to those innovations,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are a non-profit, and our purpose is to build AI that benefits everyone \u2026 in the same way that a couple of generations ago, people could go to the library and learn.\u201d<\/p>\n Open AI on Friday suspended the ability<\/a> to generate videos featuring likenesses of Martin Luther King Jr after his family complained about the technology.<\/p>\n Lehane also said China and the US were engaged in a \u201cvery real competition\u201d to shape the future of global AI, pitting values head-to-head.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t necessarily think about this as a fight as much as it is a competition \u2013 but it is a very real competition, and the stakes are pretty significant,\u201d he said, adding US-led frontier models will \u201cinherently be built on democratic values\u201d, while those of China will \u201cprobably\u201d be built on autocratic norms.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the two will end up being the player that the rest of the world builds on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When asked whether he was confident that America would remain a democracy, he said, \u201cdemocracy, as others have said, tends to be a very messy process \u2013 but the US has demonstrated over time that it gets this stuff right.\u201d<\/p>\n US and its allies \u2013 Australia included \u2013 are going to have to start generating a gigawatt of energy on a weekly basis to develop the infrastructure needed to maintain a \u201cdemocratic lead\u201d on AI, while Australia has the potential to develop its own frontier AI, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cAustralia occupies a really unique position\u201d in that it has a very high AI user base, 30,000 developers, \u201ca tonne of talent\u201d, a fast-growing renewable sector, fibre optics connections with Asia and is a Five Eyes nation, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open AI has broken ranks with the Tech Council of Australia over copyright restrictions, declaring it is \u201cgoing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-219827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}