{"id":"camfeed-3","numeric_id":3,"short_title":"News bosses call for AI deals","seo_title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals at Andrew Olle lecture - ABC News","social_title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say","headline":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals at Andrew Olle lecture","teaser_title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say","titles_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","titles_fetched_at":"2026-09-05T04:19:55+00:00","title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","published_at":"2026-07-21T21:20:40+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"The heads of the ABC, SBS, Nine and News Corp say AI companies should strike licensing deals rather than freely train on Australian news, warning journalism is a public good that must be protected.","text":"The heads of the ABC, SBS, Nine and News Corp say AI companies should strike licensing deals rather than freely train on Australian news, warning journalism is a public good that must be protected.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":900,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-09-04T10:49:25+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms","media"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say\", ABC News, 2026-07-22, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202) — ABC News — 2026-07-22","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-21","title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/ai-companies-stole-australian-culture","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/21.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-07-22T02:53:53+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say","excerpt":"Hi! Read: AI companies ‘stole’ Australian culture, news bosses say Rare to get the heads of most of Australia’s major news and media orgs on the same panel last night, so was interesting to hear them answer questions about the state of the industry — and, naturally, how it’s bei...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"The heads of Australia's biggest media companies have demanded that AI companies pay for the \"public good\" of Australian news and culture used without permission to train their technology.\n\nAustralian news agencies are already in talks over licensing deals, with the ABC's chief revealing that AI developer Anthropic had approached it about audio and video that capture how Australians speak.\n\nThe comments came during a panel featuring the heads of the ABC, SBS, Nine and News Corp Australasia at the annual Andrew Olle lecture last night.\n\nThe wideranging discussion covered everything from the role of AI in journalism to new detail about the departure of former Today show host Karl Stefanovic.\n\nABC managing director Hugh Marks told the audience journalism was a public good that had to be protected.\n\n\"If we lose sight of the work that's being done … then I think we'll have a worse nation,\" he said.\n\nMr Marks argued that AI companies should strike deals with Australian news companies to license works, but also acknowledged a \"delicate balance\" to provide high-quality information to Australians using AI.\n\nThis obligation to inform should not mean that news organisations should be expected to let AI companies train on news free of charge, SBS managing director Jane Palfreyman said. \"Our collective view on that would be no.\"\n\nNews Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller said AI companies knew that the \"theft\" of Australian works was a \"risk to their business in Australia\".\n\nNine chief executive and managing director Matt Stanton said his company's recent licensing deal, under which its journalism will be cited in answers from Microsoft's AI tool Copilot, was a \"good deal for both sides\".\n\nMr Stanton said that Nine's decision to cut 30 jobs was not \"directly\" a result of AI, when pressed by panel moderator ABC Radio Sydney Mornings host Hamish Macdonald.\n\nHe also said Stefanovic's \"different directions\" of his podcast had prompted Nine's decision to part ways with the former Today host, even before his controversial podcast with Tommy Robinson.\n\nPaying for journalism\n\nThe panel discussion followed a lecture by global news agency Reuters's editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni, who urged news organisations to set firm terms for artificial intelligence companies using their work and to share what they learned when AI tools went wrong.\n\nMs Galloni said journalism remained the source of reliable, first-hand reporting which people and increasingly AI systems depended.\n\nShe cited recent research showing that 10 per cent of people accessed chatbots for news each week, including 16 per cent of people under 35.\n\nMs Galloni argued publishers had no reason to give up on reaching those audience but should strike deals to have their journalism correctly attributed, accurately represented and paid for by the AI companies.\n\n\"Our journalism should be licensed, not taken,\" she said.\n\nShe cited a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week in which he promised that Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists would retain control over work used to build and train AI.\n\nUsing AI in the newsroom\n\nMs Galloni argued that it was the responsibility of news organisations to help society understand the \"pitfalls and possibilities of AI\".\n\nShe said Reuters used AI to help reporters search large collections of documents, find patterns and turn official material into fast news updates, summaries and translations.\n\nShe cited investigations that used AI to document thousands of social media posts and speeches by US President Donald Trump, and to convert 20,000 pages of Syrian government documents into searchable text used in an investigation that uncovered a mass grave.\n\nReuters is also using AI to produce headlines from press releases, draft first paragraphs in urgent stories, generate bullet-point summaries and translate stories, Ms Galloni said.\n\nBut Reuters only published journalism produced with AI once it had been reviewed by a journalist and its use was disclosed when it played a significant role in what was published, she said.\n\nShe said that, on top of AI's struggles with nuance and context, it was also vulnerable to hallucinations and other mistakes. One third-party tool tested by Reuters had once mistaken a SpaceX spacecraft for a missile.\n\n\"Thankfully we caught it,\" she said.\n\nMs Galloni said even advances in AI could not replace the reporting that made news valuable in the first place.\n\nReuters has 2,600 journalists in 165 countries, she said, including 70 staff covering the war in Ukraine and Russia.\n\n\"In my conversations with tech companies, I have often been struck by how little they understand about what original, first-hand, on-the-ground journalism is and looks like,\" she said\n\nSharing what works\n\nMs Galloni called on rival news organisations to share the lessons emerging from those experiments, drawing a comparison to the way that competing journalists would exchange safety information when in war zones.\n\n\"I would venture that it is our collective responsibility — to the public, to society — to enhance our and their understanding about the pitfalls and possibilities of AI,\" she said.\n\nThe Andrew Olle media lecture was first held in 1996 to honour the ABC radio and television broadcaster who died from an undiagnosed brain tumour in 1995.\n\nEach year's lecture features a speech on the future of journalism in Australia and raises funds for charity Brain Cancer Australia.\n\nPrevious lecturers have included New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn, Ray Martin and former News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch, as well as ABC journalists Leigh Sales and Fran Kelly.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202. 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