ADJOURNMENT

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (16:30): Artificial intelligence feels like a huge wave forming vaguely on the horizon. We can't tell yet how big it is or when it will arrive, but we can feel it looming, and already there are smaller waves lapping at the shore. The decisions we make now will determine whether we'll be able to ride the wave or whether we'll be swept away.

No-one knows how significant the impact of AI will be on society, not even the people developing the AI models at frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. In fact, these people reject the use of terms like 'building' and 'developing'. They prefer to say that they are 'growing' the AI models, because even they have no idea how they'll turn out.

That creates a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is not a reason for inaction. Our government needs to be preparing. If this is a tsunami that we're facing, we need to be ready.

Experts around the world are telling us that AI will fundamentally reshape our economy and information environment. Some are telling us it could cause the extinction of our species. Others are telling us it will bring unparalleled prosperity and equality.

A lot of these scenarios feel like unrealistic sci-fi fantasies, but, if even a fraction of the promise or peril of AI comes to pass, it will have an enormous impact on our society, and we're not ready for it. This is not just a future problem. We can already see the effects of AI—white-collar graduates struggling to find jobs, young girls in schools finding their likeness used in disgusting pornographic deepfakes, floods of AI slop online, supercharged scams, and sycophantic chatbots and companion apps hacking our children's ability to form relationships and eroding their critical thinking.

This is why I'm so frustrated by the government's passive, hands-off approach to AI policy, and I'm not alone. I've met with a large range of stakeholders across industry, business, civil society, think tanks and academia who agree. The government's National AI Plan puts forward important goals but has implemented almost no policy to achieve these goals.

Almost the only federal funding allocated to navigating our AI path is the $20 million in annual funding for the two new AI bodies, for a technology that could supposedly boost productivity by over $100 billion each year. If the government continues to pursue a passive and hands-off approach to AI policy, it means our future is at the mercy of the quirks and capabilities of AI models grown in overseas labs by tech billionaires.

That's not good enough. That's why I've put out an AI discussion paper with 18 specific policies that should be implemented now to set up the structures to govern AI policy moving forward, to capture the opportunities of AI, to deal with current harms, to prepare for emerging risks and to share the benefit of AI with all Australians. To touch on just a few of them, we should increase funding to the AI Safety Institute so Australia can test new models, monitor risks and attract technical talent to match global peers like the UK.

We should set up a national AI missions program to identify and target a handful of AI opportunities where Australia can be a world leader, like natural disaster response, agricultural productivity and medical research. We should resolve the copyright standoff by facilitating licensing agreements between AI companies and Australian creators, unlocking AI training in Australia while fairly compensating rightsholders.

We should deal with the overwhelming volume of AI deepfakes and disinformation by introducing federal truth-in-political-advertising laws and giving people ownership over their own likeness. We should require frontier AI developers to provide Australia's AI Safety Institute with early access to their models and information about the training and testing processes.

We should set binding obligations for data centres to use 100 per cent additional and renewable energy, meet minimum water-use efficiency standards, engage with community, hire locally and deliver community benefit. We should tax big tech to ensure AI companies generating value from Australian consumers, Australian data and Australian resources pay their fair share.

The thing that I hear the most from parents in my community is that we need to protect our children from sycophantic AI chatbots and companions that are causing long-term psychological harm and eroding critical thinking. The promise and the peril of AI are unparalleled. This government's passive approach is not cutting it.