At least two Australians are likely to benefit from Australia’s AI data centers. Skip Capital, the company Farquhar co-founded and with his wife Kim Jackson, has invested in a company called Stack Infrastructure, which builds data centers. That means the tech billionaire, while proselytizing about data centers, has a financial stake in a company that builds data centers.
The council’s wish list also includes “ Improved planning Approvals move quickly for both energy and data center approvals.” This desire to loosen existing regulations suggests they would like something similar to the U.S. AI Action Plan, unveiled by the Trump administration in July. This policy roadmap. The goal is to remove roadblocks so that AI innovation in the U.S. can sprint forward without being hampered by unwelcome antitrust investigations, third-party audits of their technology, regulations on misleading advertising, or environmental protections.
The AI Action Plan ignored a growing chorus of questions about whether an industry that has already received nearly $1 trillion in investment and has suffered from over-pressuring and under-delivering deserves even more help and less regulation. As Matteo Wong, a technology writer for The Atlantic, wrote : “AI products are still bug-prone, extremely expensive to build, and (are) unproven in many business applications.”
Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at New York University and a strong critic of the hype surrounding AI, has said, “We’ve been fed a steady diet of nonsense (from AI companies) for the past several years.” He doesn’t believe the tech giants can deliver on their AI promises and has called for AI regulation — a move that would seem essential considering that less than two years ago, the board of Open AI was so concerned about Altman’s handling of AI safety issues (which address the potential for AI abuse and harmful consequences) that they launched an unsuccessful coup against him.
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Whether the exception is an exemption from text and data mining, or Australia gets AI-specific legislation that provides oversight for the currently unregulated and unproven industry, will be up to our politicians. In the government’s Cultural Policy 2023, our music-loving Prime Minister gave a heartfelt speech in which he pledged to support the artist as an employee and said: “This is about our soul… who we are and the quality of our lives.”
If the Albanian government ultimately gives the green light to the exemption, it will allow billionaires to steal entire working hours from some of Australia’s lowest-paid workers so that tech companies owned by some of the richest people in the world can profit from the artist workforce. So it’s not just Australian authors’ words that are being valued in the AI debate. As we wait to see which direction the spaceship takes us, we’re also about to find out whether the words of our politicians have any value at all.
Melanie La’brooy is an award-winning Australian children’s author.
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