{
  "id": 17616304,
  "title": "AI is stealing Indigenous Australian art and churning out ‘Temu slop’, artist says",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/01/ai-is-stealing-indigenous-australian-art-and-churning-out-temu-slop-17616304",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-11-01T14:00:13.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Guardian Australia",
    "slug": "the-guardian-australia",
    "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/nov/02/ai-stealing-indigenous-australian-art-temu-slop-artist-says-ntwnfb"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Pitjantjatjara artist Sally Scales has warned that artificial intelligence is degrading Indigenous Australian art and producing \"Temu slop.\" As chair of the National Gallery of Australia's First Nations advisory group, Scales claims that AI technology undermines the agency of Indigenous artists and the authenticity of their work. This is considered a theft of cultural knowledge, despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's pledge to protect Australian creatives from copyright infringement. However, AI has already been trained on the works of well-known Australian artists such as Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without compensation.\n\nExperts are particularly concerned about the risks to Indigenous cultural and intellectual property (ICIP) as AI can scrape and alter any online content, including sacred and cultural knowledge. AI has been known to alter work, remove names, and then sell it, an act the peak body for Australian visual artists describes as causing \"cultural and economic harm.\" Searches on sites such as Temu, Shein, and Amazon reveal numerous items labeled as Aboriginal paintings, often without proper attribution to any artist.\n\nAccording to intellectual property specialist Prof Kathy Bowrey from UNSW Law, copyright infringement is already a problem for one in five creators without AI involvement. However, the issues become even more complex when the creators are Indigenous people, partly due to a lack of control over ownership and respect for Aboriginal culture. An example given by Bowrey is an organization paying to use artwork or images of Aboriginal people, then later using AI to update or repurpose those images without permission. This results in the artists not receiving repeat business and having to compete against AI-generated content.\n\nThe National Association for the Visual Arts (Nava) has highlighted the concept of Indigenous data sovereignty, which calls for Indigenous peoples' authority over their data, cultural material, and knowledge. Nava has pointed to the work of Wuthathi and Meriam lawyer Terri Janke, an international authority on Indigenous cultural and intellectual property, who has documented instances of AI scraping Indigenous art center websites, removing artists' names, and altering their work. Janke has also warned about the broader risk of AI reproducing cultural knowledge without consideration for accuracy or appropriate use.",
  "summary": "Chair of National Gallery’s First Nations advisory group says the technology is undermining artists’ agency and the authenticity of their work Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast AI is taking First Nations art and turning it into “Temu slop”, the Pitjantjatjara artist Sally Scales has said. Scales, the chair of the National Gallery of Australia’s First Nations advisory…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}