MANILA, Philippines – Google has submitted a proposal to the Australian government, calling for the revision of copyright laws that will facilitate the training of AI models in the country, The Guardian reported on Wednesday, August 9.

It told the government to promote “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems.” 

The site reported that Google has already called for fair use exceptions in the past, but its proposal to allow opt-outs from publishers, creators, or copyright holders is a new one. 

Similarly, ChatGPT maker OpenAI recently posted about how website administrators can block their own web scraper called GPTBot, which also represents a rare admission from the company that it indeed uses a bot to crawl sites, and find suitable training data for its AI systems. 

The blocking process involves editing a site’s robots.txt file to disallow the said bot, similar to how administrators might block other bots or web spiders from indexing their site. 

Google’s opt-out proposal might be carried out in a similar manner. The company pointed The Guardian to a blog post that discussed the creation of a new robots.txt web standard for opting out. 

But Google’s proposals appear problematic, and favorable only to itself and other AI companies. Experts interviewed by the site point out that there are already systems in place such as the Creative Commons standard that allow creators to label their work as free. 

An opt-out system automatically assumes that the copyright holder has given its permission that its data can be harvested, with the option of taking back that permission later. It’s the reversal of current copyright processes, where an entity must first seek permission before using copyrighted material. 
Google’s proposal comes as Australia reviews its AI regulatory framework. – Rappler.com