Journalists swarmed OpenAI’s Jason Kwon as he walked into NSW parliament on Tuesday.
asserted
he → swarm → Tuesday
The company’s chief strategy officer had flown in from the US to say sorry.
asserted
officer → fly → US
In June, during internal testing, OpenAI’s AI agents had accessed non-public files on a federal Medicare statistics portal.
asserted
agents → access → portal
Kwon gave methodical, matter-of-fact answers to how a US company hacked Australian health data and then took weeks to tell anyone about it.
asserted
company → give → it
One observer noted he sounded like ChatGPT.
asserted
he → note → ChatGPT
Yet the most damning evidence had arrived hours earlier, from a single voice actor.
asserted
evidence → arrive → actor
Jacqui Duncan has voiced more than 5000 commercials for Australian radio and television.
asserted
Duncan → voice → radio
And, as she told the committee, she owns none of them.
asserted
she → tell → them
Last financial year, Duncan earned about 30 per cent of what she had consistently made in the three years before.
asserted
she → earn → years
She now works a second job.
asserted
She → work → job
“AI voices and performances have definitely played a big part,” she told this masthead.
asserted
she → play → masthead
Clients have also used them to push down the rates the union spent years fighting for, she said.
asserted
she → use → years
“It’s faster and cheaper, so therefore we should be as well.”
asserted
we → ’ → ?
Duncan, the NSW president of Equity, the performers’ division of the media union, gave evidence to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence.
asserted
Duncan → give → Intelligence
“I never gave consent for my work to be taken,” she said.
asserted
she → give → consent
“Our members are already 62 per cent down on their work in the last 12 months,” Simon Kennedy, president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, told the same hearing.
asserted
Kennedy → tell → hearing
Over two days in Sydney and then two in Melbourne, witness after witness described AI reshaping work for voice actors, bank staff and supermarket workers.
asserted
witness → describe → actors
When Ford, Toyota and Holden shut their Australian plants, workers got three years’ warning and about $380 million in support from governments and the carmakers.
asserted
workers → shut → governments
Victoria has put up $14 million for workers at risk from AI.
asserted
Victoria → put → AI
‘It’s about consent’
asserted
It → ’ → consent
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google all put Canberra on notice - Australia’s copyright rules will dictate whether they train their flagship models on local soil.
asserted
they → put → soil
But copyright usually belongs to a studio, label, publisher or advertiser, not to the performer or writer who made the work.
asserted
who → belong → work
Under the deals and funds on the table, the alliance warned, the money flows to whoever holds the copyright.
asserted
whoever → warn → copyright
Duncan has never held the copyright to her own commercials.
asserted
Duncan → hold → commercials
“But if it’s my biometric data and 20 years of industry skills that go into those performances, I should have a say,” she said.
asserted
she → ’ → say
Clients, she said, should not get a performance at all if it “only exists because mine and thousands of others’ training, performance skills, experience and creative consciousness have all been whittled down to ones and zeros, fed into an LLM (for free) and then exported”.
asserted
mine → say → LLM
She knows voice artists and actors who have been replaced by AI copies of themselves, their voices or faces used in new campaigns without consent or payment.
asserted
voices → know → consent
When one colleague asked a producer why he had not even been consulted, Duncan said, the producer replied that he “assumed consent was given”.
asserted
consent → ask → producer
“It feels violating,” she said.
“It’s not about payment; it’s about consent,” Kennedy told the committee.
asserted
Kennedy → feel → committee
“Opting out after the fact is too late, because you cannot un-violate somebody.”
Training the replacement
Inside Australia’s biggest employers, the fear is about losing the job altogether.
asserted
fear → opt → job
Labor senator Tony Sheldon pressed Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn on the case of Kathryn Sullivan, who he said had worked at the bank for 25 years.
asserted
he → press → years
Last year, Sheldon said, the bank tasked her with training one of its chatbots, then gave her a day’s notice that the chatbot would take over her job.
asserted
chatbot → say → job
Comyn said he did not know whether it was a day’s notice, but owned the error.
asserted
it → say → error
“I have apologised for that in the past; I have no hesitation in doing so,” he said.
asserted
he → apologise → hesitation
He flagged one of the hardest problems ahead: “I think people do and will feel that they’re training technology.
asserted
they → flag → technology
‘Barcodes with a pulse’
For many of the country’s lowest-paid workers, AI already acts as the boss, according to their union.
uncertain
AI → pay → union
The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association represents 200,000 retail, fast food and warehouse workers.
asserted
Association → represent → workers
Its chief of staff, Robert Tonkli, told the committee on Wednesday that AI already sets their rosters, hands out their tasks and increasingly decides who gets performance managed.
asserted
performance → tell → tasks
The union’s submission tells of a supermarket worker with more than 30 years’ service who received a final written warning for scanning errors.
asserted
who → tell → errors
An AI checkout system, using overhead cameras to match items against scans, generated it.
asserted
system → use → it
…and 46 more, not listed.
The Aporia
