Rapid AI growth is raising questions about how technology companies use creative work, especially where copyright and payment rules are unclear. Concerns that AI systems rely on unlicensed material at scale point to potential impacts on creative industries and existing legal protections. Australian policymakers are being asked to manage the balance between supporting innovation and protecting intellectual property.
An artificial intelligence (AI) expert claims big technology companies are committing the “greatest heist in human history” by using copyrighted creative work to train AI platforms.
Professor Toby Walsh of the University of New South Wales said his anger had spilled over into outrage as Silicon Valley billionaires were destroying our culture through what he described as “illegal” copyright theft after downloading books from Russian pirate websites to train their AI systems.
“[It is] the greatest heist in human history… the use of books, music, news reports, and much else by the tech industry for training their large language models,” Prof. Walsh said.
“ChatGPT was trained on most of my books without my consent and without any compensation—in fact, ChatGPT was trained on millions, probably tens of millions, of books.
“They should have at least bought the one copy that they used but, instead, they downloaded it from a Russian pirate website. I think nothing says advancing humanity quite like stealing IP from a server in St. Petersburg.”
The tech companies claim it as fair use, but he said it wasn’t fair because they were using “stolen copies” on an industrial scale.
“If you destroy the economy of books, songs, or graphic design, then you destroy the very culture that makes our life so rich and life worth living,” he said.
“It’s clear the tech companies don’t care… and it undermines their claims of fair use to go into competition with the owners of that copied intellectual property.”
Internal communications showed that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the use of a large dataset of pirated books to compete in the AI race, which Prof. Walsh said included his book. In addition, Meta employees removed the copyright information from the data set to try and disguise the theft, he said.
And it wasn’t just Meta as, in September, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, faced a class action copyright lawsuit for $1.5 billion, or $300,000 per book.
“The takeaway is clear. It’s better to break the law and pay a huge fine than do the right thing,” he said.
“But we don’t have to accept the strip mining of the Australian creative sector to power Californian algorithms. If tech giants view these giant fines as cheap licensing fees, the lawmakers and regulators here must step in with penalties that actually threaten the bottom line.”
Prof. Walsh said their blatant disregard for our culture was clear with OpenAI’s CTO telling a conference in June 2024 that some creative jobs just shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
“I’m sure the graphic designer who’s recently driving my Uber will be thrilled to hear that,” he said.
“We’re already seeing the impact… in a global survey of job postings, adverts for graphic designers fell 33 per cent last year compared to the previous, photographers by 28 per cent, writers and copy editors also by 28 per cent.
“I refuse to accept an AI revolution that enriches founders in Silicon Valley by impoverishing Australian artists, musicians, and writers.”
