Nice work on the Medicare hack, Albo, but you’re still letting AI steal my art

September 24, 2026 — 7:30pm

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It was encouraging to hear Anthony Albanese stand up to OpenAI on Thursday over the Medicare hack. Too bad his government is so complicit with the giants of artificial intelligence when it comes to their theft of works by artists like me.

In mid-2023, a tech-savvy friend let me know that every single image of my paintings, photographs, sculptures, collages and drawings appearing anywhere on the internet had been “scraped” by none other than OpenAI. I was among 250 Australian artists who had joined a long list of international contemporary artists to have had their entire visual language stolen and their creative rights trashed.

Six months later, a novel and all associated writings by my wife, Kylie Needham, were stolen by the same company.

Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called it the “largest theft of labour in human history”. In a legal brief filed by The New York Times, he said it was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”. No requests received, no permissions given.

I was furious. It was a clear breach of the water-tight copyright policy drafted by the Holt and Gorton Liberal governments and enacted in 1968 that has protected generations of Australian artists and fostered the burgeoning story of my beautiful country.

Albanese isn’t just betraying authors like me. He’s selling out Australia to AI colonists

Richard FlanaganWriter

So, yes, it is disturbing to learn that OpenAI’s rogue agent broke into Medicare data. Our government apparently accepts that this was not the company’s intention. And yet, it plans to aid and abet........

© The Sydney Morning Herald