AGSC AI Policy and Code of Ethics
Advocacy & industry
The Guild’s AI Policy sets out what Australian screen composers believe about AI, what the Guild will do, and what we are asking of government, APRA AMCOS, AI companies, producers and funders.
It was developed by the AGSC AI Committee between April and October 2026 and is built on a survey of the membership.
To be published on 20 October 2026.
Why now
A year ago the Australian Government ruled out a copyright exception that would let AI companies train on Australian creative work without permission. On 12 October 2026 the parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence wrote to the Prime Minister recommending, among other things, that the Government examine current copyright settings. The Joint Select Committee reports on 30 November. APRA AMCOS has told the committee that in four years not one multinational AI platform operating in Australia has asked what a training licence would cost.
Whether your music can be used to train AI systems without asking you, and without paying you, is being decided over the next few months. The Guild is publishing this policy now so that screen composers have a clear, counted position while that decision is made.
What the policy says
The policy has seven pillars.
- Consent, Licensing and Copyright. Your consent to be involved with AI systems, and being paid for that involvement. Your music can’t be used to train an AI system without your consent, given in advance, for each and every use. Saying yes once is not saying yes forever. Further, permission is not the same as a sale. Where your music is used in training, payment should be ongoing and should reach you, not stop at the first company in the chain.
- Transparency and Accountability in AI Systems. Knowing what is going on with your work. You should be able to find out what a system was trained on, how AI is being used on a screen production, and whether the music an audience is hearing was made by a person or a generative AI system. The duty to disclose sits with the people who have the information: the companies building the systems, and the producers using them. It should not be pushed onto a composer who cannot know something that wasn’t disclosed to them.
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural material. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander songs, language, stories and cultural expression belong to communities, not to individuals. An AI system trained on that material without the community’s consent causes harm, and no individual licence within the current system can authorise this. Consent for one use is not consent for training. [Line to be cleared with Leah Flanagan before publication.]
- Music made by people. Human authorship, with a human-made mark. Music written by a person carries something a system does not produce: a point of view cultivated through lived human experience, a relationship with the film-maker, our knowledge and expertise. The Guild says this publicly, and asks the industry to be able to tell the difference. We will create a human-composed mark, the Human Made Music mark, backed by a public list so that a claim can be checked.
- How members work with AI. The AGSC Code of Ethics for Generative AI. Members may use AI tools that assist their craft. Members do not present music generated by a system as their own composition. The line is between tools that help you make something, and systems that make it for you. The Code is set out below.
- Composition is work. A composer’s work is protected labour. Screen composition is work, and the Guild defends it as work. That means the commissioned works, the rates paid for them, and the path that lets a new composer build a career. A member should be able to decline work that involves AI without professional penalty.
- Not doing this alone. International alliances. The Guild does not make this argument alone. We work with screen composer guilds and collecting societies overseas, line up our definitions with theirs where we can, and act together where a joint position carries more weight.
The Code of Ethics: what members commit to
- I do not deliver music generated by a system as my own composition.
- Where I use AI tools in a way that generates musical material, I tell the producer.
- I do not put material I have been entrusted with, above all First Nations cultural material, into any tool that learns from what it is given.
- I read what I am asked to sign about AI, and I ask the Guild when I am not sure.
The Code is what the profession expects of members who use these tools. It is not enforced. There is no complaints process and no penalty. Its weight comes from the fact that it describes what almost the entire membership already does, and from the mark, and the template contract clauses that put it into practice.
What we are asking for
Of government: hold the line on no copyright exception for AI training, and make licensing the only lawful way to train on Australian music.
Of APRA AMCOS: a licensing scheme that pays composers. Publish the rules for who gets paid what before any collection begins. Distribute on evidence that a work was actually used where that can be shown, and say plainly where it cannot. Add two separate flags to the record of each registered work, one saying whether it is cleared for AI training and one saying whether AI was used in making it. Set a payment floor so that small earners are not administered out of the scheme. Carry cultural information with each registered work, so that where a recording came from travels with it.
Of the companies building these systems: disclose what they were trained on. Build in guardrails so that a system will not produce material derived from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural expression on request, in the same way it refuses other harmful instructions.
Of broadcasters and platforms: label AI-generated music at the point where the audience hears it.
Of producers and their lawyers: stop writing training rights into buyouts. Accept the terms of the template warranty paragraph, and stop asking composers to sign a promise about the word “AI” with no agreed meaning.
Of broadcasters, funders and producers: recognise the Human Made Music mark, and no public funding for projects using AI generated music.
Of Screen Australia: one sector-wide standard for human-composed marking, developed with the guilds. Consider a condition on publicly funded low-budget content that the score is human-composed.
Of the other guilds and APRA AMCOS: carry the “AI buyout” problem, carving training rights out of future buyouts, jointly. Recording artists sign the same clauses with labels, and a claim made across the whole music sector travels further than one made only by the AGSC.
The full wording of each ask, written to be lifted into a submission or a letter, is in the Formal Asks document below.
The evidence
Every figure in the policy comes from the AGSC AI Member Survey, run from 14 July to 1 August 2026, with 76 responses. Percentages are of the members who answered that particular question.
- Not one member accepts a complete cue generated from a prompt to a generative AI music system. 85% accept AI in audio restoration and clean-up.
- 81% support per-use, opt-in consent before any training.
- 93% back the ‘Human Made Music’ mark, the strongest result anywhere in the survey, with only one member against.
- 70% of members, given a blank box, wrote about work disappearing.
- Members report fees falling, and work lost to AI-generated or AI-library music. The harm is concentrated in short films, animation and games, which is where the newest and lowest-paid members work.
AI Member Survey Report: Published 19 October, 2026.
The documents
AGSC AI Policy and Code of Ethics v1.0
The full policy: the reasoning behind each pillar, the survey evidence, plain-terms explanations and a glossary.
To be published on 20 October 2026.
AGSC AI Policy: Formal Asks for Submissions and Correspondence
The Guild’s asks in the wording we use in submissions and letters, sorted by who is being asked. Written so that a paragraph can be lifted without reading the full policy.
Members also receive a Real World Scenarios companion by email and through the members portal, with worked examples for each pillar.
To be published on 20 October 2026.
What happens next
The policy will be reviewed every twelve months, because the tools and the law are both moving. The first things members will see in the coming months are a template warranty you can hand a producer, AI and ICIP clauses for the Guild’s contract templates, a plain-language list of what AI tools actually do, and contract clinics. A members’ AI register is planned, and we will write to members when it opens.
If you have lost work, or a rate, to generative AI, tell the Guild. Australia has no data on this, and your account is the evidence we need.
Contact
AGSC AI Committee: Josh Hogan, Chair
Media enquiries: Kingston Anderson
Email: agsc@agsc.org.au