Professor Michael Cowling

speaker

96 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Professor Michael Cowling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Download This Show · How do you stop being addicted to your phone? · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

Uh so it it's just is I think it is essentially a bunch of Australians identifying that their AI resources have been used to train these models without permission.

Um and we're just getting more and more Australian groups like Kylie Minogue and ACDC and various other places noting that this is actually happening.

Um and to answer your question, 100% is happening.

These AI companies, uh their job is to switch.

scrape all of the data that is available into their model so that they can give you better quality results.

And that includes Kylie Minogue's locomotion or ACDC's most famous song as well, because then it's able to generate better output for you.

So it actually essentially goes through so let's talk about a large language model like ChatGPT or something like that.

It essentially goes through this thing, let's say a novel.

Looks at all of the words and how they're associated together and assigns weightings so that when you ask it to write something in the style of Harry Potter, it sounds like it is Harry Potter because it has read Harry Potter, is understood the way that J.K.

Rowling puts her words together and can make something that sort of sounds similar to Harry Potter.

And that extends to you asking it novel questions as well.

Um and of course the question.

then becomes if is that stealing?

Uh is that stealing or is that not stealing?

Because if I were to ask you to write a book in the style of Harry Potter as a human being,

Well, if you read Harry Sot Harry Potter and you're uh you're inspired by it and you write something that doesn't necessarily use those characters or steal that story, that's okay, right?

And that's why copyright law is particularly complicated and why this is sometimes difficult to understand in terms of stealing versus just fair use.

Look, it uh I think part of the problem is that what we're not actually talking about a database of all of the world's literary or musical works.

It's not in the system.

It was just used to train the system originally.

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