Australia urged to tax businesses replacing workers with AI

The Australian government is being urged to impose tax on businesses that replace human workers with AI tools.

The Media, Entertainment, and Arts Alliance (MEAA) submitted to Parliament in May a string of recommendations to address the growing risks of widespread AI use in Australia.

The recommendations include the adoption of "AI Tax" on businesses that replace human workers with AI tools.

Other suggestions include requiring workplaces to consult workers about the intended use of AI and ensuring that content used to train generative AI models is subject to consent and compensation.

AI stealing from creatives

These recommendations come amid MEAA's findings that the work of Australian creatives is being "systematically scraped to train AI" without their knowledge and consent.

Creatives aren't being compensated for having their work used by AI either, according to the MEAA's findings.

Erin Madeley, MEAA chief executive, called the situation the "biggest corporate swindle in history."

"It is theft, plain and simple – theft of people's voices, their faces, their music, their stories and art," Madeley said in a statement. "For the big Silicon Valley tech companies that own these machines, their business model is built on taking others' work and selling it as their own and what we've seen so far is the thin end of the wedge."

The MEAA chief executive acknowledged that AI presents the "most profound change" in the relationship between work and production since the internet.

"If left unchecked, the increased use of AI tools in the media, arts, and creative industries will lead to mass job losses and the end of intellectual property as we know it," she said. "It will also drive the erosion of our news and information to the point where the community cannot tell fact from fiction."