NAVA cautions against premature AI agreement

While reports of a potential breakthrough between unions and big tech on compensating creators for AI training data offer glimmers of progress, the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) remains cautious.

This week, the federal government hosted a three-day economic reform roundtable, where unions and the tech sector discussed a possible model to pay creatives for content used in AI training. NAVA joins other creative industry leaders in affirming that any arrangement must be firmly grounded in existing copyright law.

Australia’s Copyright Act provides essential protections for artists. It ensures that the use of artworks and images requires permission and payment. This applies for publication, reproduction, or AI training.

Earlier this month, the Productivity Commission proposed a new exception to copyright for text and data mining, similar to those introduced in other countries, to support the development of AI in Australia. This would give AI companies legal cover to use copyrighted works without permission or compensation to train their systems.

NAVA strongly opposes this recommendation and joined other arts peak bodies in rejecting the proposal. Such an exception would threaten the rights of artists, whose work is already being scraped without consent to train generative AI systems. In a recent survey of NAVA Members, over 80% expressed concern that AI poses risks to their income, practice, and moral rights. Artists called for consent, remuneration, and transparency.

“Visual artists deserve to be respected, recognised, and paid for their work. This must remain true in the age of artificial intelligence,” said Penelope Benton, Executive Director of NAVA.

“Training AI systems on copyrighted images without consent is not innovation; it is exploitation. Visual artists are already among the lowest-paid workers in the country. Expecting them to subsidise the growth of AI with their unpaid labour is unethical.”

Generative AI must not be built on the unauthorised scraping of artists’ work. Visual artists must be meaningfully included in shaping AI policy, and existing copyright protections must be enforced to uphold their rights.