‘Don’t kill music’: Anthony Albanese’s favourite bands beg PM to stop AI companies from stealing their work
TL;DR
Australia’s tech lobby is reportedly pitching a deal: more than $50bn for datacentres and a $350m fund for creatives in return for looser copyright rules around AI training. Guardian Australia says the proposal could make music, journalism and books easier to scrape for model training. Senator David Pocock calls it the ultimate dirty deal. Artists from Anthony Albanese favourites such as Powderfinger, Spiderbait, Middle Kids and the Go-Betweens warn against use without consent, attribution or fair payment.
Nauti's Take
This is the kind of AI deal where the headline number shines and the bill lands with creators. $50bn for datacentres sounds massive, but a $350m fund is not a free pass to ingest a country’s cultural memory.
If tech companies want to train models on music, books and journalism, they need rights, contracts and payment. Anything else is not an innovation agenda; it is scraping with political packaging.
Briefingshow
The story shows how AI infrastructure can become a political bargaining chip: datacentres, jobs and investment in exchange for weaker cultural rights. For musicians, this is not just licensing paperwork; it is control over context, income and cultural identity. If an opt-out becomes the last line of defence, the baseline has already shifted.
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