22nd October 2026
All 23 members of the Creators’ Rights Alliance have signed a letter to the Australian Government, urging them not to introduce an opt-out mechanism for AI training.
The Australian Government is considering an ‘opt-out’ mechanism which would allow commercial AI developers to use creators’ copyright-protected work, unless the rights-holder explicitly opts-out their consent.
This could potentially weaken protection for rights-holders around the world, as the territorial law applies to the copying activity taking place in that county, and not the origin of the materials being copied, as explained by Inside Story here.
An opt-out would weaken the copyright protections on which creators’ livelihoods depend, and it is neither a practical nor workable option for a multitude of reasons which have been outlined by tech expert, musician and former Stability AI Lead, Ed Newton-Rex.
Taking the example of just one dataset: with almost 6 billion human-authored images scraped for just one text-to-image dataset (Laion-5B, training models such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney), to place the onus on creators to individually ‘opt-out’ all their works and further digital copies of their works (licenced or shared on social media platforms) is an insurmountable, if not impossible, task.
The UK Government similarly put forward proposals to introduce broader copyright exceptions with an opt-out mechanism to legalise AI training. But these proposals were met with overwhelming opposition from the creative industries and beyond, and were consequently taken off the table.
We ask the Australian Government to listen to creators and their representative organisations, reject the proposed opt-out mechanism, and pursue an approach that supports responsible AI development. This means creators are asked permission (opt-in) and have the choice to agree to the licensing of their creative works.
Creators’ livelihoods must not be jeopardised for the commercial goals of overseas tech companies.
