The company has called for Australian policymakers to promote “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems”.

The call for a fair use exception for AI systems is a view the company has expressed to the Australian government in the past, but the notion of an opt-out option for publishers is a new argument from Google.

Dr Kayleen Manwaring, a senior lecturer at UNSW Law and Justice, told Guardian Australia that copyright would be one of the big problems facing generative AI systems in the coming years.

“The general rule is that you need millions of data points to be able to produce useful outcomes … which means that there’s going to be copying, which is prima facie a breach of a whole lot of people’s copyright.”

“If you want to reproduce something that’s held by a copyright owner, you have to get their consent, not an opt out type of arrangement … what they’re suggesting is a wholesale revamp of the way that exceptions work.”

Toby Murray, associate professor at the University of Melbourne’s computing and information systems school, said Google’s proposal would put the onus on content creators to specify whether AI systems could absorb their content or not, but he indicated existing licensing schemes such as Creative Commons already allowed creators to mark how their works can be used.