Digital Rights Watch is disappointed but unsurprised that the Productivity Commission has swallowed the AI marketing hype. Their recent interim report advocates for a pause on regulation and discusses approaches that would roll-back the few existing protections that we have. This is at odds with most Australians who want the government to act to protect them from harm by unaccountable and unfair AI systems.
The Productivity Commission’s interim report on data is quick to highlight the benefits of a supposedly inevitable AI productivity boost, but we must ask who will be the recipients of those benefits (spoiler: it’s big tech corporations in America) and who will be paying for it (regular Australian people). The Productivity Commission has embraced a tech bro vision of the future, and the rights and concerns of Australians have come off second at best.
The Productivity Commission’s vision is narrow and out of touch; they propose a pause on regulation at a point in time when we need it urgently.
Most people want better regulation of big tech: 64% of Australians want stronger AI regulation, and 83% say they would be more willing to trust AI systems when assurances are in place. Australians also want stronger privacy protections, not workarounds like “alternative pathways” designed to allow big tech to circumvent our existing privacy principles. We’ve got good reasons for this: a ’let it rip’ regulation-as-a-last-resort approach to AI is a policy that favours big tech’s power over the human rights of everyday Australians.
The report also floats a “Technology and Data-Mining” (TDM) exemption for big tech, which will see not only industrialised levels of copyright infringement but also an acceleration of mass data extraction and corporate surveillance. This has already caused enormous problems for our democracy by proliferating disinformation in our civic spaces. It also creates enormous cybersecurity risks, as millions of Australians caught up in data breaches know too well. We should be disincentivising these business models, not leaning into them. Most people feel that we missed an opportunity by failing to properly regulate social media. We must not miss the opportunity to regulate AI while we still have the chance.
It is not acceptable for big tech to take our personal information for one reason and then use it for an entirely different purpose; this is totally inconsistent with respecting our human rights. If privacy act exemptions get implemented retroactively, the information that has already been hoarded about Australians could be used without our consent or even knowledge. This would be extremely damaging not only to the privacy of individual Australians, but also to our collective ability to build an economy on advanced technologies. Australians tell us that they will trust AI if it is properly regulated. If we want a strong, productive economy, training AI systems on our stolen information is exactly where we don’t want to be, and where we can’t afford to be.
The Productivity Commission needs to realise that strong regulation is required not only to “build community trust and business confidence” but to protect Australians from being exploited by the largest tech companies in the world.