Senate report on AI: Protecting Australian creatives and their work

Amid the uncertainty surrounding the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on creative professionals, the Parliament has made a significant move to safeguard the rights of Australian workers.

In November 2024, the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) released its final report on the “opportunities and impacts for Australia arising out of the uptake of AI technologies in Australia”.

The Committee’s 13 recommendations were well-received by major stakeholders within Australia’s creative industries, such as the Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG), Screen Producers Australia (SPA) and Australian collecting society APRA AMCOS.

“By acknowledging the significant harm generative AI can cause — both economically and culturally — the recommendations offer a pathway to protecting the creators who form the cultural backbone of this country”, said APRA AMCOS CEO, Dean Ormston. “These are the people whose works enrich our lives and power an industry worth billions to our economy.”

Here’s what you need to know:

Consultation with creative groups

The report strongly criticised Big Tech companies for their lack of transparency regarding the use of user data to train models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama. In particular, the use of creative works by these multinational tech companies was described as an “unprecedented theft”.

The Committee recommended “that the Australian Government continue to consult with creative workers, rightsholders and their representative organisations” through the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group (CAIRG) to address this issue.

Transparency and fair renumeration for creators

The Committee also called for legal mechanisms to ensure transparency from AI developers about their training processes, and to enforce proper licensing and remuneration for creators whose works are used in both training and commercial AI-generated outputs. Regarding the latter, the Government was urged to engage in further consultation with those involved in the creative sector.

Regulation of high-risk uses of AI

Notably, the committee recommended the introduction of legislation dedicated to classifying and regulating high-risk AI uses. General-purpose AI models, such as those owned by Amazon, Meta and Google, are intended to fall within this category.

“Australians need laws that protect rights,” said Labor senator Tony Sheldon, the inquiry’s chair, “not Silicon Valley’s bottom line.”

You can read the full report here.

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