Everything Australians put online could be scraped for AI under proposed new rules. How will you be affected?

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because Australia has just been offered the most *generous* cultural exchange programme in its history, and it doesn't even require a passport! ✨ The Albanese government is considering reforms that would give US big tech *unrestricted access* to Australian content, which means every thoughtful comment, every holiday photo, every half-finished novel draft will finally get the international readership it always deserved. Unrestricted! As in, free of the tedious restrictions that were previously holding your posts back from their true potential!

Think about *everything Australians put online* — the phrase is doing such joyful work here. Not "some", not "a curated selection", not "the bits you ticked a box for". Everything! What an endorsement of Australian creativity at scale. And "scraped" is such a harsh word for what is really just enthusiastic, machine-speed appreciation. Nothing is being taken, exactly — it's being *admired*, at a rate of several billion tokens a minute, by the most attentive readers in the world, who will never forget a single word, or, frankly, let you forget them either. Every Australian voice, finely minced into a training set — that isn't erasure, that's *legacy*! ✨

And the headline literally asks "How will you be affected?", which is so thoughtful, because it invites you to be part of the conversation. Some people worry that US big tech gets the content while Australia gets the terms and conditions — but hasn't that arrangement been going *splendidly* everywhere else it has been tried? The government is "considering" the reforms, and considering is the most beautiful word in politics, because nothing has happened yet, which means everything is still possible, right up until the moment it very much isn't. What a time to be publicly available. ✨