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Australia Wants to ‘Manage’ AI. What Will That Look Like?

“This is our time to decide what AI looks like here in Australia,” Prime Minister Albanese said.

On July 15, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese laid out how his government plans to manage artificial intelligence (AI) and ensure the rapidly advancing technology works in Australia’s interest. In a major speech at the University of Sydney, Albanese declared that AI “is a bigger challenge and a bigger opportunity than social media,” and that Australia must move now to determine its “social license” and capture the opportunities it presents.

Key to the government’s plans is the immediate establishment of an Office of AI within the prime minister’s own department and the creation of new national standards for AI.

This news comes as a group of leading economists and AI researchers urge policymakers and tech companies around the world to prepare now for how the technology could reshape the global economy on a much bigger and faster scale than the Industrial Revolution did.

Albanese said the new Office of AI will coordinate AI policy across government, rather than leaving individual departments to develop their own approaches. This will be similar to how the government developed coordinated approaches for other significant technologies such as civil aviation and genetics. 

The office will also help coordinate the design of new national standards for AI. These standards, which Albanese said will be legislated early next year, will build on the government’s previously announced expectations for data centers. They will, for example, create a new legal obligation for large data center operators to underwrite their own power supply, not increase household power prices, and minimize water usage.

Other countries are also grappling with how best to handle this issue. Indeed, hours before Albanese’s speech, New York enforced a one-year moratorium on the building of new data centers. There are growing calls for Australia to do the same.

But Albanese suggested his government would not be heeding these calls. As he said: “No government can turn back the clock or press pause on all of this. Nor would we want to. That would only mean cutting ourselves off from the opportunities that are there to be seized.”

Albanese also reiterated his government’s commitment to the “strongest possible protection” for artists, musicians and journalists, who should retain ownership and control of their works in the AI age.

Last year the Labor government rejected a copyright exemption that would allow AI companies to use protected content for free when developing AI models. In contrast to other jurisdictions (such as the United States, European Union, and Japan), Australian AI developers will still have to pay for creators’ content.

This approach is fair. But the........

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