AI, art, and staying human - is creativity at a crossroad? Evelyn Araluen, Steve Tolz, Kirra Pendergast 

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Natasha Mitchell (0:38)

If creating art, poetry, literature lies at the heart of what makes us human, humane, what happens when AI makes art for us? Hey, welcome to Big Ideas. I'm Natasha Mitchell.

Yes, the judges of France's most prestigious literary prize have recently removed a bestseller from this year's long list over unproven accusations of AI use, which in fact seems to have bumped up the sales of the book. And AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are pushing back right now at Australian copyright laws designed to protect the works of authors and artists. So let's talk art, AI, and the future of creativity. On Big Ideas today, Natasha Mitchell joining you from the stage of the 2026 Byron Writers Festival on Bungalung Country, with the acclaimed author of Dropbear and The Rot, multi-award-winning Goorie and Koori poet, educator, co-editor of the Overland Literary Journal, it's Evelyn Araluen. Booker Prize nominated Steve Tolz, whose new novel, A Rising of the Lights, is set in a near future, one that's being infiltrated by AI, by robot teachers and carers and therapists, and AI and digital safety advisor. Kirra Pendergast is a co-founder of Safe on Social, and with parenting expert, Maggie Dent, the co-author of Digital Freedom, A Guide to Less Screen Time for Safer, Happier, and Healthier Families. And let me tell you, she deals with some really confronting cases in her work with young people, parents, and schools, as you'll hear. Let's give them a warm welcome.

I'll start with Steven Evelyn. There's a tool that the Atlantic has put out, and I recommend you have a look at it. It's the AI Watchdog team have put together a tool that allows you to check whether your books have been scraped by corporate algorithms to feed the likes of GPT and Claude. And your books have, as you probably know. And I'm interested to know what you feel about that.

Evelyn.

Evelyn Araluen (2:57)

Yeah, not great. Um, yeah. And again, I always like to try to create my first response as a way of also acknowledging and honouring country and custodianship. I never quite work it out because how am I going to link Big Tech stealing my book, my books which includes language and includes stories and history and family about country and taking it, taking it into this abstract digital space where it can be completely decentralised and completely removed from that context. How do you link that back to honouring country? And I always decide I'm going to work it out as I speak the sentence. Listen, certainly it felt violating, but that was measured by the fact that I anticipated and assumed that was going to happen.

And certainly after the experience of writing Dropbear and seeing my work be decontextualised, sometimes well-meaningly and sometimes malevolently, and removed from its context of its intentions of honouring, respecting and revering country and that means its continuous custodianship, its continuous sovereignty, you know, here in Arakul Nation, that's so beautifully represented by Onni Delta, who's just sitting there, but all over this unceded land, you know, country is held by its storytellers, by its custodianships, and the ways that these forms of digital theft decontextualise that, all of them need to be resisted and pushed against and so, you know, not a fan of it.

I think-

Natasha Mitchell (4:43)

Do you feel able to resist? Potentially.

Evelyn Araluen (4:44)

I mean, I think you just keep having to come back to, and as we'll discuss, I think you just keep having to come back to find ways to further, deeper entrench it. And it's made me make different decisions about what I put in my writing, made me make decisions around how much of culture goes into my books. And that's sad because I like connecting with readers, especially with black readers.

But I don't think going forward I would feel comfortable using any more language in my writing.

Natasha Mitchell (5:14)

So you're self-censoring?

Evelyn Araluen (5:16)

Self-censoring in the sense that the object of a book that gets published in a commercial industry has things that are no longer in it that, you know, that I don't feel safe releasing in that environment. But that actually motivates me to find other ways of fostering connection and sharing outside of those spaces and always finding a way of strengthening the connections that, you know, the object of a book was never going to fully encapsulate anyway. That's how I'm trying to spin it. Did I have a little cry about it at the time?