Big tech has already stolen millions of samples of creative work to feed its AI bots. Copyright is all but dead. Can anyone stop this mass theft?
Big tech has already stolen millions of samples of creative work to feed its AI bots. Copyright is all but dead. Can anyone stop this mass theft?
Opinion
May 10, 2025 — 9.30am
If a famous chef wanted to publish a cookbook that was actually useful, it might be called How to Cook When You Haven’t Left Enough Time And Don’t Know Where Anything Is.
It would have chapters titled: “Where’s The F—ing Cornflour?” and “Why Is the Person Who Hid the Cornflour Not Answering Their Phone?” or “What is Cornflour anyway and Can I Just Use Flour Instead? Where’s the F—ing Flour? Oh S—, Is It Wrong To Use Self-Raising Flour!”
This is such a brilliant idea for a million-selling cookbook, you’d copyright it. Only, I Hate To Cook has been done. There are websites called “57 Recipes”, “100 Super-Easy Healthy Dinners for People Who Hate to Cook”. A service called “I Hate Cooking” comes to your home and cooks ingredients they’ve told you to buy (unless you hate grocery shopping even more than cooking). Jamie Oliver’s 15-Minute Meals are for people who hate cooking. Gordon Ramsay’s TV career is for people who hate being in kitchens.
The challenge for cookbooks is that everything’s already been done, done and done again. Less the bad ideas than the good ones, like how to make a caramel slice. The current stink setting off smoke alarms in Australia’s best-selling kitchens is whether Brooke (Bake with Brooki) Bellamy has re-hashed Nagi (RecipeTin Eats) Maehashi’s caramel slice and baklava recipes. Bellamy also has been accused of cutting and pasting Bill Granger’s Portuguese tart and Sally McKenney’s vanilla cake.
Could Brooke be a crook? Or are her recipes are a “twist on the classic”, only without a twist? Bellamy has denied the accusations, saying she was doing these recipes before she’d heard of the other chefs.
Can anyone claim a recipe as intellectual property in the first place? T.S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” In cooking, everyone steals everything, whether from other cooks, from entire traditions or, most often, from their mum. Adam Liaw, who brings to cooking his priceless knowledge as a former copyright lawyer, told this masthead, “Everything is built on what came before. Food is a collective endeavour.”
A commercial marketplace for books doesn’t want to challenge consumers, so it’s hungry for new cooks who can do familiar things with a unique point of difference: the personality of the author, the “lifestyle” they’re selling, the way they package or explicate the cooking process, how they create a modern fusion between traditional methods, and so on. (I’m still waiting for Nagi’s F***! The RecipeTin Went Missing During Our Last Move!)
It’s their point of difference, their expression of a recipe rather than the list of ingredients and basic instructions, that can be protected under copyright law. But even that is debatable. Let’s hope Maehashi and Bellamy cease to argue via social media and go to court. Pass the popcorn (the way Gran used to make it).
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But here’s an actual twist. Recipe detectives are right now running celebrity chefs’ words through plagiarism-detecting software, hunting for evidence of pilfering. But plagiarism-detecting software is itself a plagiarism, a form of artificial intelligence trained on a global copyright breach that – compared with Nagi and Brooke’s neighbourhood spat – is on the scale of World War III.
Nagi and Brooke will be out of their jobs when Microsoft, Google, Meta and the rest of big tech develop AIs to deliver the same caramel slice recipe, at zero cost, provided by an “author” whose personality combines the best of Julia Child, Margaret Fulton, Yotam Ottolenghi, even Nagi and Brooke.
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The biggest act of property theft since the British Empire is well under way. Atlantic magazine recently revealed that Meta has lifted millions of books from a pirate website, Library Genesis, to train its AIs to speak. It considered a deal to pay the authors it was stealing from, but decided not to bother. Previously, Microsoft did something similar to train its ChatGPT. Laughably, these companies cried thief when the Chinese AI upstart, DeepSeek, simply stole American big tech’s already hot goods.
To train that convenient predictive text, those answers to searches that save you time, that piece of text that you don’t want to think about writing, that essay or story you don’t want to compose – or that recipe you don’t have time to look up – big tech have been stealing literally millions of samples of creative work that are far more original than Nagi’s or Brooke’s and destroying copyright itself, declaring unilaterally that anything “out there”, once stolen, is anybody’s.
If copyright is eradicated on such a universal scale, so is the incentive to innovate. So is the protection of your creative labour. It isn’t limited to published authors. Big tech has arrogated to itself the right to steal everything you have written, whether professional or “literary” or every Google search you have ever typed. There are belated challenges in American courts, but big tech has proceeded on the strategy of steal now, see if anyone can force you to pay later. In response, some publishing companies are inserting clauses in authors’ contracts to prevent their work from being used to train AI models (clauses worth less than the virtual ink they are printed with) or are already caving in, asking authors to deal with, or indemnify, the thieves.
If the new Australian government wants to live up to its promise of “no one held back and no one left behind”, to its overtly nationalist program of doing business “the Australian way”, it can regulate AI developers to be transparent with how they are using copyright material, to ask creators for permission to use their property, and to compensate them fairly.
I searched the Liberal Genesis database and found Nagi’s and Brooki’s books were all there, already stolen and used to train machines to train you how to make a caramel slice. Nagi and Brooki’s works are, probably without their knowledge, already helping big tech destroy their futures and those of other chefs.
This is one thing they have in common. They are both being ripped off. If they want to make a noise about copyright theft, they might be better off putting their fame to help stop a property crime that makes their bunfight, by comparison, less than a pinch of salt.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald. He is also a board member of the Australian Society of Authors.
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