Abstract: This essay examines the unfolding impact of AI on Australia’s trade publishing industry. Currently, AI developers are pursuing an aggressive rollout of their technologies through pre-existing infrastructures. This rollout continues to have varying impacts on different states and industries depending largely on how reliant they might already be on foreign technology and how easily they might be subjected to automation. Using a Digital Anti-Colonial framework (a conceptual framework that centres the role of technology in establishing and maintaining relationships of economic, political, and cultural domination) this essay inquires into the encroachment of AI into terrain traditionally the reserve of Australian trade publishing. After reviewing the unique role of trade publishing in Australia, this essay first analyzes the ways AI is currently being used to automate audiobook production and “summary book” production. It then analyses the use of intellectual property in training AI and the ongoing debate around fair use. This essay argues that the risk posed to the Australian publishing industry by AI is significant. AI threatens to reduce important processes of knowledge creation, evaluation, sharing, and stewardship to one automated process of economic extraction. Unmediated, AI is at odds with Australian trade publishing, which serves important functions in Australian society and culture that go beyond economic accumulation. It is important, therefore, that Australia’s trade publishers, industry bodies, and other stakeholders involve themselves in shaping legal frameworks around AI in ways that protect these vital socio-cultural assets.
Francis Harvey (Wed,) studied this question.