Australians owe Scott Farquhar a vote of thanks. When the Atlassian co-founder and freshly minted chair of the local tech lobby fronted the National Press Club recently, he articulated the industry’s claim on the nation with rare honesty.

The T-shirt wearing billionaire shared his log cabin story about a 12-year-old who naively predicted the internet, Amazon and the mass automation of work. But it was when he pivoted to the Tech Council of Australia’s talking points that things got real.

According to the Tech Council, AI will deliver $115bn in annual productivity (or about $4,300 per person), rubbery figures generated by industry-commissioned research based on estimates on hours saved with no regard for jobs lost, the distribution of the promised dividend benefit or how the profits will flow.

In return for this ill-defined bounty, Farquhar says our government will need to allow the tech industry to do three things: build a data and text mining exemption to copyright law, rapidly scale data centre infrastructure and allow foreign companies to use these centres without regard for local laws. This is a proposition that demands closer scrutiny.

The use of copyrighted content to train AI has been a burning issue since 2023 when a massive data dredge saw more than 190,000 authors (including me) have our works plundered without our consent to train AI. Musicians and artists too have had their work scraped and repurposed.

This theft has been critical in training the large language models to portray something approaching empathy. It has also allowed paid users to take this stolen content and ape creators, devaluing and diminishing their work in the process. Nick Cave has described this as “replication as travesty”, noting “songs arise out of suffering … data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing.”

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The sense of grievance among creators over the erasure of culture is wide and deep. A wave of creators from Peter Garrett to Tina Arena, Anna Funder and Trent Dalton have determined this is the moment to take a stand.

It is not just the performers; journalists, academics, voiceover and visual artists are all being replaced by shittier but cheaper automated products built on the theft of their labour, undermining the integrity of their work and will ultimately take their jobs.

Like fossil fuels, what is being extracted and consumed is the sum of our accumulated history. It goes from metaphor to literal when it comes to the second plank of Farquhar’s pitch: massive spending on industrial infrastructure to accommodate AI.

The Tech Council sees Australia’s future prosperity tied to the rapid development of the energy-hungry and water-thirsty data centres that the industry requires to power their rosy vision of the future, one where thousands of short-term jobs are created to build the centres that then will run largely autonomously. No mention that there is already a shortage of tradies to build houses and that the people who will be looking for jobs are the one in two young graduates whose entry paths AI will close.

No mention either of the impact on the broader energy network, already struggling to meet our existential carbon reduction targets. An MIT Technology Review investigation estimates that even in its infancy the industry is gobbling more than 4% of US energy, tipped to rise to 12% of the grid by 2028.

But the study found it’s hard to gauge the extent of the sector’s claim on resources because the AI companies are deliberately opaque about their footprint. What we do know is there is the intensive energy required to train the models, and ongoing power used each time an AI is deployed. A simple search is calculated at 10 times the energy for a Google search but more complex prompts and demands for images, audio and video consume much, much more, not to mention agents and always-on companions.

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This imperative to power AI is the justification used by Donald Trump to recharge the mining of fossil fuels, while the industry is beating the “modular nuclear” drum for a cleaner AI revolution. Meanwhile, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is reassuring us that we don’t need to stress because AI will solve climate change anyway!

The third and final element of Farquhar’s pitch is probably its most revealing. If Australia wants to build this AI nirvana, foreign nations should be given diplomatic immunity for the data centres built and operated here. This quaint notion of the “data embassy” overriding national sovereignty reinforces a growing sense that the tech sector is moving beyond the idea of the nation state governing corporations to that of a modern imperial power.

That’s the premise of Karen Hao’s book The Empire of AI, which chronicles the rise of OpenAI and the choices it made to trade off safety and the public good in pursuit of scale and profit. “OpenAI is now leading our acceleration toward this modern-day colonial world order,” she writes. “In the pursuit of an amorphous vision of progress, its aggressive push on the limits of scale have set the rules for a new era of AI development.”

As Hao points out, there are versions of technology that do not race to scale in the name of AI. Do we give up when we accept the hyper-scalers’ vision of AI? Or are there smaller, more responsible uses of this sophisticated tech that could be more effectively deployed to solve real human problems?

In clarifying the industry’s position, Farquhar has put the acid on all of us to be clear about what we will and will not give up to the tech bros and their fantasy machines. Our culture, resources and democracy for $4,300 a year? Thanks for the offer, but no thanks.

Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company. Essential is conducting qualitative research for the ALP