Publishers should be able to opt out of having their works mined by generative artificial intelligence systems, according to Google, but the company has not said how such a system would work.

In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.

The company has called for Australian policymakers to promote “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems”.

Dr Kayleen Manwaring, a senior lecturer at UNSW Law and Justice, told Guardian Australia that copyright would be one of the big problems facing generative AI systems in the coming years. “The general rule is that you need millions of data points to be able to produce useful outcomes … which means that there’s going to be copying, which is prima facie a breach of a whole lot of people’s copyright…. If you want to reproduce something that’s held by a copyright owner, you have to get their consent, not an opt out type of arrangement … what they’re suggesting is a wholesale revamp of the way that exceptions work.”

Read more:

Taylor, J. (2023, August 8). Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/google-says-ai-systems-should-be-able-to-mine-publishers-work-unless-companies-opt-out