‘Dangerously unprepared’: UNSW expert says Australia must regulate AI and invest in research

UNSW Sydney Scientia Professor Toby Walsh warns that Australia is falling behind in harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and failing to put the safeguards in place to manage its risks.

One of the world’s leading AI researchers delivered a stark warning at the National Press Club, arguing Australia was dangerously unprepared for both the profound opportunities and harms associated with the rapid rise of AI.

UNSW Scientia Professor Toby Walsh said AI presented both an extraordinary opportunity and a serious threat to Australian society – and the federal government was failing to keep pace. He called for robust regulation to ensure AI was developed and deployed safely, ethically and in the national interest.

“I have one question for our politicians that I’ve never seen answered well – what makes Australia so special that we’ll see the benefits of AI without making the sort of new AI laws that other nations are introducing?

“It surprises me that politicians are so reluctant to regulate AI.

“It seems to me that regulating AI would be a real vote winner, as well as the right thing to do.”

Social media a warning for AI harms

Prof. Walsh argued that Australia had previously demonstrated global leadership in confronting powerful technology companies to reduce social media harms, and must now show the same resolve in regulating AI.

“Australia had a real success with the age delay law for social media,” he said.

“Social media should have been a wakeup call about the harms of unregulated AI. We’re about to supercharge the sort of harms we saw with social media with an even more powerful and persuasive technology.

“What I fear most is that I’ll be back here in three or four years’ time saying: ‘We tried to warn you.’ But another generation of young Australians has now been sacrificed for the profits of Big Tech.’”

AI race puts Big Tech under scrutiny

Prof. Walsh warned that the race to dominate AI had amplified the unchecked power of major technology companies, highlighting the rise of AI-generated scam advertisements. He cited internal documents from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, that showed 10% of the company’s 2024 revenue – more than USD $16 billion – came from scam ads and banned goods.

“Imagine that 10% of the goods on the shelves at The Good Guys were counterfeit or illegal. You’d demand that Fair Trading shut them down by the weekend,” he said.

“I don’t understand how we continue to let Meta trade in Australia. For many years, Meta outrageously claimed that they don’t trade in Australia.

“Meta makes about the same money in this country from scam ads as criminals do from cocaine. Or around the value of all illicit tobacco seized in Australia.

“I could give you many more examples where my anger with the tech companies bringing AI into our lives irresponsibly has turned into outrage. AI companions that undermine our ability to connect with each other, AI doctors that offer dangerous medical advice, AI nudify software that weaponises the abuse of women and AI deepfakes that destroy the distinction between truth and untruth, threatening the cohesion of our society and the functioning of our very democracy.”

Prof. Walsh also condemned the large-scale use of copyrighted books, music and journalism to train AI models without consent or compensation - including his own books - describing it as a fundamental theft of intellectual property rather than fair use.

“I refuse to accept an AI revolution that enriches founders in Silicon Valley by impoverishing Australian artists, writers and musicians.”

The economic future: from red dirt to digital

Prof. Walsh criticised Australia’s federal government for chronically low AI investment compared with other nations, and for shelving plans for a permanent, independent AI advisory group.

He noted that Canada had invested about six times more in AI than Australia over the past five years, while Singapore, with less than a quarter of Australia’s population, had invested fifteen times more.

“We need to ramp up investment in AI significantly or we’ll miss the AI race. Actually, we need to increase investment in all R&D, not just in AI,” he said.

“As a percentage of GDP, R&D spend in Australia is at a historic low of just 1.68%. We need to double this to bring us into line with other OECD nations.

“Our future isn’t in shipping red dirt and coal to China. It will be in bits and bytes, increasingly AI-generated bits and bytes.”