This is not the issue, however. AI is not proposing a new musical taste; it is proposing that musical composition is simply labour that obeys “assembling patterns and information gleaned from large datasets”. If that’s all it is, then the act of musical composition is just another task that humans can do without, and therefore (according to AI-hungry corporations) that humans can do without paying for.

With unwitting enthusiasm for AI, Dr Whittle developed his increasingly sinister-sounding theme by talking about visual art. He showed an AI-made exhibit displayed at the National Gallery of Victoria. He had photographed his young daughters dancing in front of it.

Again, taste for the artwork is the least relevant consideration. Maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But machine-produced visual art has been around for a while, at least since Andy Warhol’s screen prints asked us to consider what art is. As a novelty, it asks good questions. But for it to be presented, 50 years later, by scientists as a labour-saving alternative is a little off the pace, at the least. One of the essentials of human art is that it is made by humans, whose motives and puzzles are what open the brain to surprise, mutation and advance.

But humans still have their place, according to the CSIRO: as AI’s artistic “collaborators”. For example, he said, his daughters were “collaborating” with the AI artwork by dancing in front of it.

Fifty years ago (again), interesting questions were raised about the audience’s role in completing a work of art. On the other hand, girls can dance in front of a fountain or a waterfall or a tree. It doesn’t make them collaborative artists and it doesn’t turn a tree into art. There is an infinite depth to artistic production that – at risk of sounding religious – is unknowable, precisely because it emanates from mercurial, mixed up, inefficient humans.

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If this is making AI sound incapable of creating anything new, isn’t that its own boast – that it can only plagiarise the work of others? Not in a tricky, provocative, post-modern way, not as recombinant collage, but as plain theft? The purpose of predictive text, after all, is to anticipate what we already knew. Its efficiency lies in saving us the trouble of thinking. Its virtues lie entirely in efficiency and never in originality (unless you are a true academic cynic who thinks “originality” is an alternative fact).

With so little experience or insight around creative processes, then, you wouldn’t think digital technicians would have much say in how the federal government creates rules for artistic intellectual property when it is affected by AI. That would be as silly as creating road rules by listening to motor engineers but not drivers. And inviting corporations into these discussions would be like having car salespeople in the room and still no actual drivers or, for that matter, the pedestrians who get mown down when the brakes fail. Yet, in viewing the AI challenge as a mechanical question of intellectual property, the federal government is in danger of doing just that as it considers the ownership of artistic works fed into and spat out of the AI meat-mincer.

It would be regrettable if scientists and corporations are given the greatest sway in making laws about art. As regrettable as artists making laws about science or business, which of course would never happen in Australia. Composing music or writing or painting or sculpting are real labour, but it is not an efficiency problem waiting for a mechanised solution. Many authors still work with pen and ink; it is inefficiency, raw manual labour, that often produces artworks of genius.

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When I was thinking AI could relieve some of the grunt work from the writing professions, I was being short-sighted. As the writers on strike in Hollywood are stubbornly pointing out, AI will first replace junior careers. Gruntwork is how they learn their trade. You let AI do their job, you are eliminating the apprentice. For a futuristic tool, that’s a pretty good way to eliminate the future. It is an(other) assault on the young. Every big stride, in every walk of life, builds its foundation upon apprenticeships.

Nor is lawmaking a form of labour that can be outsourced to machinery. The typing part can be improved by predictive text, but not the thinking. Lawmaking is artistry too, requiring touch and instinct. I hope the lawmakers remember this when they are considering the future of other forms of art and work.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.