Topics: Artificial intelligence, data centres, copyright
E&OE
Patricia Karvelas, Host: For a business perspective, I spoke to Bran Black, the CEO of the Business Council of Australia, a short time ago. Bran Black, welcome to the program.
Bran Black, Chief Executive: Thanks so much for having me.
Patricia: Do you welcome legislated mandatory AI standards to provide guardrails in Australia?
Bran: Well, I think ultimately that has to come down to what those standards say. So we welcome the fact that the Prime Minister is affording AI a really high level of priority personally by having this new office created within his own department. There is a lot of work that needs to be undertaken in terms of what these standards say.
We need to make sure that we don’t overregulate, and as a consequence of that, stifle our capacity to win investment, but on the other hand, we’ve got to make sure that we recognise that communities do have concerns with respect to AI, and we need to respect those concerns, and we need to make sure that we work with those communities to ensure that trust is established on the journey.
Patricia: The Government had been saying, however, that it wouldn’t legislate. It’s clearly changed its position. Do you think that was the right call?
Bran: Well, of course, it depends on what we’re talking about in terms of legislation. If you go back a few years ago, the type of legislation that was proposed, or at least on the table for consideration, was legislation that would have ensured that companies that were seeking to introduce artificial intelligence into their operations, in some circumstances, indeed in many circumstances, would be forced to seek some type of approval before they could do that, which would have really made it impossible, almost in a practical sense, to bring about the new technology into your workplace. That’s not on the cards as far as we can see.
What does appear to be on the cards is discrete standards that go to particular types of issues, and of course, the devil is in the detail as to what those standards say. But we welcome the opportunity to engage with the Government on those standards as they’re developed.
Patricia: The rules for data centres forcing them to generate more power than they take from the grid. Do they seem fair to you?
Bran: Well, we would suggest that a better way of looking at that is to prioritise applications for new data centres that do encourage more generation being developed and which also minimise the utilisation of water resources. So I would stress that point: it’s the prioritisation of particular proposals rather than an outright mandate that they must provide their own power or they must deliver their own sources of water for the purposes of cooling.
Our concern there is that if we go too far down that very prescriptive path, then that will put us out of step with other jurisdictions. And whilst we have lots of natural advantages in Australia, that as the Government rightly recognises, act as an attractor for data centre investment, we do see that plenty of other countries also have those advantages, and we do see lots of investment going to those other countries. And a great example is that AirTrunk, an Australian company, has just committed a whopping $42 billion of investment in India, not Australia.
Patricia: The Prime Minister said artists would retain control over their work as well, and they’ve ruled out a text data mining exemption. But do you think copyright deals need to be struck?
Bran: Well, what we’ve proposed is a process that would see content creators effectively have the opportunity to opt out of having their material used for the purposes of training large language models, and that would mean that if those models wish to train on those materials, they would need to engage directly with the content creators.
We think, therefore, that it is appropriate to recognise that at the end of the day, creators do have agency, and that’s precisely what the Prime Minister spoke about, and in circumstances where creators want to be recognised and rewarded for the content that they create, there should be compensation that’s payable in circumstances where those large language models are seeking to train on that material.
Patricia: Do you worry about AI’s social license for business? Do you fear future worker strikes over AI, given it does have the capacity to lead to job losses?
Bran: Look, it’s a really good question because I think it goes to the heart of the issue that has ultimately prompted the Prime Minister to personally engage on this question of AI today. We know that people do have concerns about AI. There have been lots of predictions in terms of job losses.
None of those have been realised to date, and that is a really good thing. Indeed, what’s apparent is that through government research, as recently as this week, through the Department of Workplace Relations, it’s clear that across all sectors, we are seeing job increases, not job reductions. That’s what we want to see. That’s ultimately the goal.
But we appreciate that people nonetheless have this concern. We think that there are a couple of key things that we need to do in that regard. The key step that we need to take is investing more heavily in how we upskill our own population, because there is going to be a lot of change in the way in which people do their jobs. We need to make sure they’ve got the skill sets that are necessary to take advantage of all the opportunities that AI will bring.
Patricia: Just on another topic, business has traditionally had a more natural affinity for supporting and working with the federal Coalition, but with the nature of politics shifting, have you been also starting to speak to One Nation?
Bran: We always speak right across the Parliament with all parties.
Patricia: But not equally. I mean, you talk to parties of government the most, right?
Bran: We actually try and make sure that we engage right across the board, and the reason why we do that is that we are genuinely non-partisan in our own approach to the development of policy. We support policy that is good policy wherever it comes from, and we’ll call it out as being good. And equally, if there is policy that we don’t support, again, wherever it comes from, we’re very comfortable calling it out as being policy that we don’t think is in Australia’s interests. But the way that we think that you generate the best policy is by having that deep engagement, and so from our perspective, it’s really important to constantly be talking right across the Parliament.
Patricia: Okay, many thanks for your time.
Bran: Thanks so much for having me.