Why Australia’s marketers need to worry about the lack of local artificial intelligence laws

February 15, 2024 10:03

Welcome to an end-of-week update from Unmade. Today: With the European Union in the final stages of approving groundbreaking new laws around artifical intelligence, humAIn curator Cat McGinn argues that Australia’s legislators are moving too slowly to support the interests of our industry. And the Unmade Index flattens as the spotlight shifts to Nine’s results announcement next week.

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Always crashing in the same car

DALL-E: throwing legislative caution to the wind

Cat McGinn, curator of humAIn, writes:

The new EU Artificial Intelligence Act – the world’s first attempt to legislate the impact of artificial intelligence, looks set to become law. This week, two key EU committees approved the new rules, with legislation likely to follow within the next two months.

The legislation aims to navigate a delicate balance between safeguarding human rights, democracy and environmental sustainability, while enabling commercial success and innovation to flourish.

By contrast, Australia’s legislative framework for AI is voluntary. Built on principles put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Australia’s government expects the organisation or individual hurt by an AI tool to seek redress under our existing laws. That’s the wrong approach.

The status quo means that there is no protection, compensation or framework for the impacts of AI on the media and marketing world, nor on the general public.

The stakes are high, and it’s extremely challenging, nay, borderline impossible, to predict all the possible misuses or benefits of AI technologies.

What’s wrong with Australia’s approach is that AI is not only more complex, but inherently and qualitatively distinct from other technologies.

Legislation needs to work within a specific cultural and social context. Australian attitudes to data protection and privacy were a factor in the overhaul of our Privacy Act: we know these safeguards matter deeply in our culture and to our customers.

This is the tip of of the iceberg, but as it stands, there is no requirement for organisations to disclose where human effort ends and AI begins.

Learning the lesson of how the marketing industry lost the trust of consumers by failing to respect their digital privacy, we would be wise to get ahead of the inevitable future backlash by developing a framework where the customer feels empowered, informed, and can choose to opt in – or not.

In our near-term landscape of undetectable fakes, as reality becomes subjective, customer trust will become the most precious commodity and differentiator a brand can seek to earn.

Customers will look to organisations – from mastheads to marketing – for a reliable and consistent experience. Loyalty will shift from an accumulation of points on a card to something more tangible and profound, a deeper unmet human need: “I trust you to help me make sense of the world.”

Transparency now will save us from heartache – and penalties – later.

Clarity about sources of training data, safeguards around bias, interpretability (the ability to understand the processes of the large language models), informed consent from customers and a robust framework for rights management and remuneration are critical.

The federal government being glacially slow to respond isn’t only a concern for consumers being able to opt in or out of engagements with AI. For the creative industries in particular, issues of fair use of content, copyright and creative ownership are paramount.

As we stare down the barrel of the likely collapse of the News Media Bargaining Code, it’s clear that the creators of the content used by tech companies to generate vast profits will never be adequately compensated for their efforts, nor will the haemorrhaging of audiences publishers have lost to digital aggregators be staunched.

I mention this because past behaviour is the biggest predictor of future behaviour.

“Search,” by which I mean typing an oddly staccato rendition of what you want to know into a browser box, then selecting a result and clicking through to a site you hope will answer your query, is going to fall away. By now this may seem innate, but search is merely a learned behaviour.

Search engines and digital platforms are beginning the transition to “no click” search, where an AI-generated, hyper-personalised version of the available information will be served up to the consumer without them ever needing to visit the information source. For advertising-funded media, that’s a critical problem.

Whether those results are provided natively by a chatbot, Microsoft’s “Deep Search”, or Google’s “search generated experiences,” the likelihood is that once again, the connection between brands and their customers, or news mastheads and their audiences, will be intermediated by tech companies.

As the lawsuits pile up, we simply don’t yet know where the axe will fall. In a purely commercial sense, what’s the ROI of investing in content or journalism over a plurality of years, with the single objective of building a relationship with your audience or customer, only to stand helplessly, haplessly by as that expensive, expertly-authored content is used to divert audiences away from your destination or sales funnel?

We are once again at risk of leaving critical decisions about our local industry to the hands of global tech companies, who pay no tax and have an agenda which may well be at odds with our own.

Stephen King, Federal Productivity Commissioner warns against over-regulation of AI, viewing it as a solution to our productivity crisis. But under-regulation will create a greater and more wide-reaching crisis, by many orders of magnitude.

The best analogy for AI adoption comes from Harvard’s Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology, Latanya Sweeney.

She reminds us that the difference between AI and previous technologies is the length of the runway. If we compare the impact of the automobile on society, the key difference is time. Between the idea of the car, and the mainstream distribution of cars, there was space for consideration, the development of infrastructure and a social contract:

“Cars needed cities and others to invest in actually building roads. That was a negotiation between society and the manufacturers that had to unfold. And what happened during that unfolding? Well, when you first would get in the car and you push the gas pedal, we didn’t know how fast it might go. Well, these things caused harms to individuals and became major lawsuits and concerns. And so, as a result, if you wanted paved roads, you had to improve the safety of the automobile.”

It’s time to develop a new social and economic contract. AI is a collective intelligence and it demands a collective response.

Cat McGinn is curating our AI conference for media and marketing, humAIn which takes place on May 28. She will not be bringing her soapbox to the event. She is, however, still seeking content and speaker submissions via cat@unmade.media.

Early bird tickets are on sale now.

Unmade Index flattens as Nine fades

Tim Burrowes writes:

The Unmade Index remained flat yesterday, ignoring a lead from the wider ASX All Ords which rose by 0.8%.

After two days of rippled driven by pessimism over Seven West Media’s prospects, there was no clear direction on the index, which tracks Australia’s listed media and marketing companies.

Domain, majority owned by Nine, had the best day, up by 4.73%. The two major audio stocks – Southern Cross Austereo and ARN Media – both rose too, by 1.49% and 3.19% respectively.

Nine lost 1.57%, and is now trading at its lowest point in four months. Nine will release its financial results for the first half of the financial year on Thursday.