When the stakes are so low...

Over the last few days, my feed has been filling up with musicians posting about recent revelations (via The Atlantic's AI Watchdog tool) that their creative work has been taken and used to train music-making AI platforms - without the creator's permission.

Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. We've already seen the publishing industry rocked by reports of similar uses of millions of pirated books in 2025 to train large language models for generative AI platforms. Yep, that is the thing that's used when you ask your AI platform of choice to draft / summarise / edit / rewrite your written work.

And remember a few years earlier when everybody got onto that fun trend of getting AI to generate a whole suite of fun profile pictures based on some headshot photographs? Yep - creative works by visual artists all stolen for the purpose of training AI to generate art. (Also, if you did that, they now own your face as well.)

The thing that strikes me about all this is that the people who are exploited are already some of the lowest-paid professionals. An article in 2024 reported that income from creative work in Australia (books, music, visual art, theatre, etc) averaged at $23,200 a year. Half of Australian musicians earn less than $6,000 from their craft. The average Australian author earns around $18,200 from book sales, with 75% of them earning less than $15,000. And the average visual artist in Australia earns even less, with an average income of $13,937 from their arts practice.

And yes, it is exploitation. AI technology is a multi-billion dollar industry, sponging from the life's work of others with no consent or compensation. And when the stakes are so low, and the vast majority of artists cannot even make a living wage from their art, it's just adding insult to injury. 

Alongside all this AI news, and depressing news about the continued cost of living crisis, people are more and more turning away from supporting the arts, with regular stories about music festival cancellations and major theatre productions being cut short.

If generative AI is a technology that we want to adopt and implement in our daily lives and workplaces, then what does this say about how we support our creative industries? Who would want to be a creative in this day and age when this is how we as a society are valuing their creative work?

Regardless of whether you use AI or not, it's never been a more important time to go and support the arts - go and buy some Australian books, go to a live music gig, theatre production or dance show. Buy visual artwork. Let our creatives know that we still value their contribution to Australian society.