After decades watching one of the nation\u2019s most beloved industries whittle away under all manner of unfortunate circumstances, Australia\u2019s musicians are drawing a thick line in the sand when it comes to big tech.<\/p>\n
From rusted-on pub heroes to ARIA darlings, artists are ramping up their fight against what they view as one of the biggest threats the industry has ever faced. <\/p>\n
While many of us scoffed at Metallica going after bedroom pirates to protect their war chest, the issue has now snowballed into something that is simply out of control. Instead of smelly teenagers trying to save money downloading Nevermind on LimeWire, it\u2019s now a multi-trillion-dollar, foreign-owned tech monopoly looking for a cheap ride.<\/p>\n
At the centre of the battle is a deceptively simple question: Should AI companies be allowed to train on Australian music, books, films and journalism without asking permission or paying for it?<\/p>\n
The answer, according to a growing coalition of Australia\u2019s creative industries, is a very loud no.<\/p>\n
They argue the country\u2019s existing copyright laws are already fit for the AI era, requiring technology companies to negotiate licences before using Australian creative work. Weakening those protections, they say, would shift billions of dollars offshore and could fundamentally change who owns Australian culture in the age of cheap replication.<\/p>\n
It all comes under the umbrella of a broad issue we must all face eventually, no matter which industry we\u2019re in. Agency is being systematically stripped away year-by-year in the face of the all-encompassing, ever-advancing tech timeline. <\/p>\n
Whether you\u2019re paying attention or not, the idea of true \u201cownership\u201d, whether it be purchased digital media<\/a> or something you\u2019ve uploaded yourself, is slowly being redefined.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a debate now playing out in Canberra, where the Albanese Government is under immense pressure from some of the world\u2019s biggest technology companies to make it easier for AI models to access copyrighted material.<\/p>\n A cohort of Australia\u2019s most vocal creatives across multiple generations took the issue right to the top on Wednesday morning, but the bigger issue facing creators is much more than a political dance over who gets paid what.<\/p>\n News.com.au spoke to a number of people in various roles across the industry who are urging the Albanese Government to resist calls to weaken copyright protections as artificial intelligence companies look to expand.<\/p>\n For some, the issue is genuinely existential, with the concept of the eerie \u201cAI crossover point\u201d being discussed more frequently by the day. <\/p>\n The problem is, we may have already passed it.<\/p>\n Missy Higgins worried about AI \u2018backflip\u2019<\/p>\n Missy Higgins has been one of Australia\u2019s most-loved folk-pop artists for over 20 years. She is acutely aware of the conundrum facing herself and anyone else who might baulk at the idea of their work being gobbled up by a billionaire without consent.<\/p>\n She emerged in the early 2000s, a time where artists had their own generational hurdles to leap. Now, after grinding out years of countless tours to build a successful career, she, like anyone else with a digital footprint, is now grappling with the idea that it was all to feed an offshore data centre.<\/p>\n She doesn\u2019t even get a say, because those data centres are predominately owned and operated overseas outside Australia\u2019s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n Artists now find themselves at a very peculiar moment in their careers, where they could soon witness echoes of their life\u2019s work being spat back out by a tacky AI song generator, wielded by a dim acquaintance exclaiming: \u201cHow good is this!\u201d<\/p>\n The software \u201clearns\u201d from anything it can get its digital mitts on, and then repackages it at warp speed to fit the prompt. The prompter then functionally \u201cowns\u201d the \u201ccreation\u201d and can monetise it as they see fit, depending on each platform\u2019s rules.<\/p>\n For America\u2019s tech billionaires, who stand to profit immensely from this concept until the end of time, it appears both inevitable and beneficial for humanity for us to be sneezing out homogenised slop-rock on the loo. <\/p>\n Higgins says she hopes the government doesn\u2019t \u201cbackflip\u201d under the immense pressure of the AI tide. <\/p>\n \u201cEveryone in Australia\u2019s creative industries was very relieved late last year when the Prime Minister publicly refused to weaken our country\u2019s copyright laws,\u201d Higgins said.<\/p>\n \u201cBack then big tech and their lobbyists wanted him to sell us down the river by creating a so-called Text and Data Mining exception. Such a change would have basically let AI do whatever it wanted with Australian stories and songs but thankfully the PM stood his ground. <\/p>\n \u201cHe publicly backed our musicians, authors and filmmakers and said \u2018no\u2019 to big tech\u2019s demands. I really hope he\u2019s not about to backflip on that decision.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the AI music shills, typing \u201cAustralian female folk singer with piano and acoustic guitar\u201d and immediately receiving a faux-polished tune sounding vaguely like Missy is a marvel we should all celebrate.<\/p>\n Artists retch at this concept, and they want the government to understand there\u2019s a bit more to it than just a business deal involving a run-of-the-mill product. <\/p>\n Creative works, while still a \u201cproduct\u201d, add value to the culture they exist in. Without it, there is no culture.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s no spreadsheet that can accurately track the \u201chow much did this actually add to our culture\u201d metric, so it is often overlooked. <\/p>\n Your sweat and soul goes into your music. It\u2019s a concept very few tech CEOs appear to care about, or even attempt to understand.<\/p>\n With the big festivals going the way of the dodo, Aussie artists have been fighting uphill for years, and Higgins says the AI debacle is another giant piranha in the tank.<\/p>\n \u201cAustralian artists face enough challenges right now without adding weaker copyright laws to the list,\u201d Higgins said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf these multinational AI companies want to make use of our creative work, they should simply follow Australia\u2019s existing laws rather than demanding that the government change the rules to help big tech make even more obscene amounts of money.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark Bergin: \u2018We won\u2019t know the crossover point\u2019<\/p>\n Mark Bergin is one of thousands of journeymen musicians across Australia who have dedicated their careers to the age-old craft of entertaining fickle pub crowds. <\/p>\n He\u2019s played thousands upon thousands of gigs, big and small. His fingertips are calloused to the bone. He\u2019s dodged hundreds of schooner-wielding revellers tumbling towards his microphone to help him finish \u201cLayla\u201d. And he still enjoys every moment he gets to dedicate to making it all sound just a little bit sweeter. <\/p>\n Ask anyone who frequents the NSW Mid North Coast circuit and they\u2019ll tell you \u201cBergo\u201d is the real deal. He\u2019s observed the market\u2019s countless twists and turns through to the end of the vinyl era, into CDs, MP3s and back again. On the gig front, it\u2019s a constant battle for bands in the face of solo DJs, or no live entertainment at all.<\/p>\n So for him, and many others like him, the AI conundrum is nothing new, just something that\u2019s been sitting ominously on the horizon, glaring at working musicians from afar for decades. <\/p>\n Add in the inescapable prevalence of autotune across most charting music, on top of a backdrop of mysterious \u201covernight successes\u201d, and you get a pretty daunting landscape for the next generation of musicians hoping to give it a serious crack. <\/p>\n But the Mark Bergins of the world still play on happily, because for them, working to become a genuine master of the craft has real value, even if the CEO of Suno believes you\u2019ll feel better if you just prompted a song into existence<\/a>.<\/p>\n That passion and general enjoyment for what you do, Bergin says, is something generative AI will never be able to replicate or understand.<\/p>\n He says audiences can feel it right away when something is procedurally generated, and react the best when something wild, unexpected and \u201chuman\u201d hits them.<\/p>\n The tiny, random and sometimes indistinguishable imperfections add to the experience, no matter the genre. The trick is getting the chaos to work for you to make something cool happen. <\/p>\n \u201cPerformance-based musicianship gave us the best music I think that we\u2019ve had, the 60s, 70s, 80s and the 90s as well,\u201d Bergin <\/a>told news.com.au.<\/p>\n He says the emergence of time-saving tools has been invaluable, but the rapid acceleration of technology in the creative space has slowly stripped away the emphasis on what makes music great in the first place.<\/p>\n \u201cThat, to me, was the start of AI in music, the automation and algorithm-ing of music. Things started becoming \u2018less real\u2019,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n \u201cOne big thing that I hear that is now a staple is auto-tune on vocals. It\u2019s been around for ages, but it\u2019s almost like a must for country music, or anything in that genre. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like all the country artists just have to have it turned right up to have this electronic chime about it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s homogenised, it\u2019s flat. Like flat wallpaper. It\u2019s not chunky and doing organic things that resonate naturally with the human ear. <\/p>\n \u201cI now switch off anything that\u2019s same-y sounding, and I don\u2019t know what percentage of that is AI these days.<\/p>\n \u201cWe won\u2019t know the crossover point without labels \u2026 we\u2019re in the crossover point right now.\u201d<\/p>\n