Google in its submission to the Australian government has said publishers should be able to opt out of having their works mined by artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM). The search giant said copyright law should be amended so that generative AI systems are not allowed to scrape the internet and use anyone’s work.
Previously, Google had called for a fair use exception for AI systems to the Australian government, but this is the first time it has floated the opt-out option for publishers, according to The Guardian.
It called Down Under lawmakers 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”.
Google wants to protect publisher’s rights
The company, however, has not said how such a system would work. Although, in a blog post released last month, Danielle Romain, Google’s VP for Trust said the platform was looking to evolve with the emergence of AI to protect publishers’ rights.
“As new technologies emerge, they present opportunities for the web community to evolve standards and protocols that support the web’s future development. One such community-developed web standard, robots.txt, was created nearly 30 years ago and has proven to be a simple and transparent way for web publishers to control how search engines crawl their content,” the blog post read.
“We believe it’s time for the web and AI communities to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases,” it added.
According to experts, copyright will become one of the bigger problems in the future as generative AI systems continue to expand their horizons.
“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,” Dr Kayleen Manwaring, a senior lecturer at UNSW Law and Justice told the publication.
Reports state the Australian government is busy chalking up a plan as part of its news media assistance programme so that AI cannot scrape sites off their content without paying any penny.
(With inputs from agencies)
