The ABC just admitted the obvious: AI companies have probably already slurped up its back catalogue, licence or no licence.
Kate Gilchrist, the ABC's head of content and legal operations, told Australia's Joint Select Committee on Tuesday that AI firms have likely already trained their models on ABC content. She also told the inquiry that AI companies can pursue licence deals to use ABC's work going forward, rather than treating the broadcaster's archive as fair game. The evidence is part of a broader parliamentary look at how AI is reshaping media and content ownership in Australia.
The admission matters because public broadcasters have mostly stayed quiet about whether their content has already been scraped, leaving that fight to commercial publishers. The ABC saying "probably already used" out loud, in front of lawmakers, shifts the conversation from hypothetical to overdue cleanup - and from "should this be allowed" to "who pays, and how much."
It's the same arc nearly every publisher has followed: deny it's a problem, threaten legal action, then quietly open a licensing conversation once the training data is already baked into the model.