What is my worth as a writer? Is it the loose change in the bottom of my bag representing six months of sales, or the value of the stories I tell, forged in stolen hours between work and loved ones like an undercover cop?
Yes, we do it because we love it. We need to love it. Because thousands of Australian storytellers are trapped in a system that measures worth only in corporate profits. The result? A creative sector that exploits the people who deliver billions to the economy.
Australia’s creative industries are a powerhouse. In 2022–23, they contributed $63.7 billion to the economy and employed 282,000 workers. Yet creators fear their contribution is reduced to a spreadsheet entry, with their deeper cultural and social impact ignored.
This tension has long existed between artists and economic policy bodies like the Productivity Commission, whose frameworks often reduce art to outputs that are easy to measure. Its 2022 study on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual arts, for example, acknowledged economic value but overlooked social and cultural benefits deemed ‘complex and difficult to measure.’ In this logic, what cannot be neatly quantified risks being devalued.
Right now, in the digital age, the stakes are higher. As Sophie Cunningham and Josh Bornstein argued in the Australian Financial Review this week, ‘stealing from artists won’t make Australia richer’. Yet that is precisely what is happening: more than 183,000 Australian books have been scraped by AI systems, transformed into training data for chatbots and plot generators.
This is no abstract threat. Authors of literary novels—who already earn a median of just $8,000 annually—see their life’s work ground into algorithmic mulch. Climate fiction becomes fodder for corporate greenwashing. Memoirs of surviving domestic violence are turned into trauma porn for bots. Indigenous stories, migrant voices, the memory of towns lost to fire—all fed into machines without consent. It is cultural and personal theft.
For creators, art is more than a job; it is identity, wellbeing and a way of documenting our collective life. To strip it of meaning and treat it as free raw material is to wound both the artist and the culture that sustains us.
And while we face this, another shadow falls: censorship. Writers who speak out on human rights abuses or genocide in Gaza are silenced, threatened with de-platforming or career damage. In an industry with few rewards for creators, this climate of fear is yet another way those creators are devalued and undermined.
As First Nations author and academic Marcia Langton asks: ‘What do we, as Australians value? Who else will nurture and defend the languages, cultures and histories of this continent; who else will tell the life stories of this place; who else will cultivate our capacity to share a common reference point of understanding…?’
The true value of art lies not in GDP, but in its power to connect, preserve and reflect. An investment in artists is an investment in our social fabric. Yet Australia’s cultural hypocrisy persists; we pack stadiums and festivals, celebrate musicians, hashtag #BuyAustralian—then look away when creators ask for fair pay.
It’s time to act. Artists must be given the legal right to block their work from training AI without consent. A levy on AI companies should fund royalties, and organisations like the Australian Society of Authors should be empowered to pursue collective legal action against tech giants, shifting the burden from individual writers.
Because here we are, writing between work shifts, chemotherapy sessions and Coles checkouts. Tapping at laptops during school pickups. Not for money, but because we need to tell the quiet rebellions, the backyard stories, the way light cuts across the Yarra. And if the next great Australian novel is written by Meta’s AI, it will not be progress. It will be a tragedy. And a crime.
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