Australia v. AI: How the Australian Government is Regulating AI Compared to Other Countries

AI is a hot topic everywhere from the classroom to international governments. As technology continues to advance, there is a struggle to find how to properly regulate this ever-changing media. However, Australia is one of the first countries to step up and pass legislation regarding the regulation of AI. On September 12, Australia’s eSafety Commission released a position paper outlining The Online Safety Act [1]. This act was first released on January 23, 2022, mandating that search engines remove AI-generated child abuse from content results. This piece of legislation is an expansion to an act originally released in 2015, the Enhancing Safety for Children Act [2]. 

So what has changed so much between 2015 to the present that a new act is required? The Online Safety Act differs by giving more power to the eSafety Commission by expanding on the definition of what content must be removed. Prohibited content now includes cyberbullying, cyber abuse, image-based abuse, illegal content, harmful content, and abhorrent violent material. The original text only allowed the removal of cyberbullying and intimate images. The act also reduced the amount of time that online engines must remove the content by, going from 48 hours in half to 24 hours [3].  

This bill is coming at an imminent time as AI is growing almost completely unchecked. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was quoted saying, “When the biggest players in the industry announced they would integrate generative AI into their search functions we had a draft code that was clearly no longer fit for purpose and could not deliver the community protections we required and expected” [4]. No matter how proactive a country may be in passing regulatory legislation, it’s extremely difficult to keep up. Australia’s approach is to further the powers awarded to their federal government.  

Australia is not the only country tackling AI. Australia’s first law came in 2022, and in June of 2023, the EU enacted the AI Act [5]. Parliament lists the priorities of the AI Act to make AI "safe, transparent, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly...and overseen by people, rather than by automation, to prevent harmful outcomes” [6]. The EU Bill includes registering AI into a database including their purpose and risk level. These different AI systems will then be assessed before becoming accessible to those within the EU. 

An overwhelming number of Western countries have come to the table to regulate AI, so where is the US? While there has been limited consensus across the federal government, each branch is tackling the issue in its own way. Vice President Kamala Harris met with major tech CEOs in July to discuss the dangers of AI and encourage the companies to follow integrated regulations from the AI Bill of Rights the White House drafted last fall. This Bill has not been enacted into law but is something that the White House has discussed enacting as an executive order. [7] Meanwhile, the partisan split Congress has been holding hearings with executives of AI companies to debate the creation of an agency dedicated to AI. The Federal Trade Commission began an investigation into OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the Congressional hearing with their chief executive Sam Altman [8].

While no laws have been passed, regulating AI is something that is certainly on the radar of the US government. Countries like Australia and those in the EU have set a range of norms for regulating AI, and it will be interesting to see developments in the US and how closely these Western countries will align on the issue of AI.