AI is stealing Indigenous Australian art and churning out Temu slop, artist says
Sally Scales, a Pitjantjatjara artist and chair of the National Gallery of Australia’s First Nations advisory group, has warned that artificial intelligence is exploiting Indigenous art to produce cheap, generic goods she termed "Temu slop." Marketplaces such as Temu, Shein, and Amazon are flooded with uncredited items bearing Aboriginal-style motifs, which Scales characterized as a theft of cultural knowledge that strips away authenticity and community lineage.
The National Association for the Visual Arts (Nava) and lawyer Terri Janke documented AI systems scraping Indigenous art centre websites to alter designs and delete artists' names. UNSW Law professor Kathy Bowrey noted that clients also pay creators once before using AI to generate unauthorized derivatives or repurpose artists' faces, forcing them to compete against synthetic copies.
While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Attorney General Michelle Rowland pledged to defend copyright, AI models have already trained uncompensated on Australian icons like Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave. To counter this, Bowrey and associate professor Oliver Bown proposed a "Copyright Plus" model requiring AI developers to reveal training data, allow creators to block scraping, and fund a cultural compensation scheme via an industry levy.
Continue in the app — vote & join in ➔