Pope’s AI Adviser Warns Australia’s Copyright Opt-Out Push Risks a ‘New Form of Colonialism’

Father Paolo Benanti, an adviser on artificial intelligence to Pope Leo XIV, warned that Australia’s emerging copyright consultation on an opt-out regime for AI training risks a “new form of colonialism” if large foreign platforms can vacuum up Australian cultural works by default, ABC News reported on October 14. Benanti met Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during his visit and praised Canberra’s tougher line on social media and AI safeguards, while urging that creators retain a real ability to refuse training use.

The Attorney-General’s Department has been consulting on how text and data mining exceptions should work for generative AI. An opt-out model would let rights holders withdraw works from training corpora, but Benanti argued that smaller Australian publishers, Indigenous custodians and freelancers rarely have the technical or legal muscle to police crawlers the way Hollywood studios do. Default inclusion, he said, would transfer cultural value offshore without consent or payment.

Benanti’s critique lands as Canberra balances productivity rhetoric with cultural-industry pressure. Publishers and unions want licensing or opt-in defaults; technology firms argue that mandatory opt-in would stall model improvement for Australian English and local knowledge. The papal adviser’s framing raises the stakes from a narrow copyright tweak to a sovereignty question about whose culture trains whose models.

What it means in practice

Any opt-out statute will only be as strong as its enforcement tooling, a theme that also runs through the AI committee’s call for embedded safety experts and early ASD access to new models. Compute diplomacy such as Anthropic’s openness to reserving AI compute for Australian government priorities will not calm creators if training data remains a free-for-all. Worker testimony about algorithmic rosters, checkout warnings and cloned voices already shows how AI can extract labour value; Benanti argues culture faces a parallel extractive pattern.

For platforms, the practical demand is machine-readable refusal signals, crawler transparency and local licensing desks—not only a webpage checkbox. For the Attorney-General, the drafting choice between opt-out and opt-in will define whether Australian works are presumed available or presumed protected.

What to watch: the Attorney-General’s next consultation paper, whether Indigenous cultural protocols get a separate track, and if major AI vendors publish Australia-specific training crawler policies before legislation lands.