Benanti asks who benefits when AI trains on Australian creative work

The new interview

Franciscan AI ethicist Paolo Benanti has challenged Australia to ask where the benefits of AI training would go if companies gained access to creative work without individual permission. In an ABC interview published on October 14 (Source: abc.net.au), he compared the extraction of cultural value for overseas profit with a “new form of colonialism”.

The warning was conditional. Benanti questioned whether such an arrangement would adequately benefit Australia; he did not present a measurement of money already lost. His intervention brings a religious ethicist’s concern about human agency and fair benefit into a debate often framed around attracting AI investment.

What is being considered

The policy question needs careful dating. In September, ABC reported on consultation proposals (Source: abc.net.au) that would give rights holders an opt-out from AI training. The reported options included different arrangements for payments and licensing. Consultation proposals should not be read as enacted law or as a final government decision.

The Attorney-General’s Department’s published reference-group account (Source: ag.gov.au) records an earlier position, from October 2025: the government ruled out a text-and-data-mining exception while examining licensing, the treatment of AI-generated material and enforcement. That historical statement does not, by itself, resolve what the government will decide about the newer proposals.

The department’s separate guidance for copyright owners (Source: ag.gov.au) says Australian copyright protection is automatic. It describes economic rights, including reproduction and publication, alongside authors’ moral rights, such as attribution and protection against false attribution. Those are different interests: paying for use and acknowledging an author do not answer precisely the same question.

A question about human choice

Benanti’s public work crosses theology and policy. The Pontifical Gregorian University lists him as an invited professor in its theology faculty (Source: www19.unigre.it). That academic role helps locate his contribution: an ethical intervention in a public debate, rather than an announcement of Australian government policy.

Benanti was visiting Australia at the invitation of the Italian Embassy. An October 12 account from Italy’s foreign ministry (Source: esteri.it) confirms that he met Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and discussed keeping AI under human control, with people’s freedom to choose at the centre. The account does not say that the meeting produced a copyright agreement.

For churches, religious publishers and other communities producing creative work, the useful distinction is between access to material and authority to decide its uses. Benanti’s question offers a way to examine a proposed arrangement: who can consent or refuse, who receives compensation, and what benefit remains with the people whose work makes the system possible?

For Christian publishers, respect for creators as neighbors should shape this scrutiny alongside a concern for access to useful tools. That is an ethical test for evaluating policy. It does not establish that any particular developer has broken the law, or settle which licensing system Australia should adopt.