December 20, 2025

The AI industry hit a wall of resistance this week. Australia just killed a controversial copyright proposal after creators revolted. UK actors voted to refuse digital scanning entirely. And a bombshell environmental report reveals AI's carbon footprint now matches New York City's. Meanwhile, Google quietly dropped Gemini 3 into the mix. Here's what you need to know about AI's biggest week of pushback.

Australia's government yesterday abandoned a controversial proposal that would have allowed AI companies to train on copyrighted material without explicit permission. The plan, which would have fundamentally reshaped how creators control their work, was shelved after intense opposition from artists, writers, and the creative industry.

The proposed framework would have introduced a 'fair dealing' exception specifically for AI training, allowing tech companies to use copyrighted books, art, music, and other creative works as training data. Supporters argued this was necessary for Australia to remain competitive in the AI race. But creators saw it differently—this wasn't about innovation, it was about tech giants getting free access to billions of dollars worth of creative work.

The reversal signals a major shift in how governments are approaching AI regulation. Rather than prioritizing AI development at any cost, policymakers are increasingly recognizing that creators' rights can't simply be sacrificed for technological progress. This decision sets an important precedent as other countries grapple with similar questions about copyright, compensation, and control in the age of generative AI. The message is clear: the era of AI companies helping themselves to creative work without permission may be coming to an end.

In a historic move, UK actors represented by Equity have voted to refuse digital body and face scanning for AI purposes. The vote represents a collective stance against what many performers see as the entertainment industry's attempt to replace human actors with AI-generated digital replicas.

The issue goes beyond simple technology adoption. Studios have increasingly requested actors submit to detailed 3D scanning, creating digital doubles that could theoretically be used to generate performances indefinitely—without additional compensation or creative control. Actors fear this technology could allow studios to create entire performances using their likeness, bypassing future negotiations, residuals, and the actor's right to choose which projects they participate in.

This collective action mirrors similar fights in Hollywood, where AI clauses became a major sticking point in recent union negotiations. The vote doesn't ban the technology outright, but it establishes a unified negotiating position: actors won't consent to scanning without proper protections, compensation frameworks, and control over how their digital likenesses are used. It's a crucial test of whether creative professionals can maintain agency in an industry increasingly eager to replace human performance with algorithmic generation.

A new report reveals that the AI boom generated CO2 emissions in 2025 equivalent to the entire city of New York. The findings add concrete numbers to growing concerns about artificial intelligence's environmental impact, as the technology's energy demands continue to skyrocket.

The research highlights how training large language models and running AI inference at scale requires massive computational resources, which translates directly into energy consumption and carbon emissions. Beyond carbon, the report also flags significant water usage for cooling data centers—a concern echoed by separate reporting on the UK's largest proposed data center potentially understating its planned water consumption. These dual environmental pressures create a sustainability crisis that the AI industry has largely avoided addressing publicly.

The timing couldn't be more critical. As companies race to deploy ever-larger models and scale AI services globally, the environmental costs are becoming impossible to ignore. This isn't about stopping AI development, but about forcing the industry to confront the real-world consequences of exponential growth. Companies that can develop more efficient models or power their infrastructure with renewable energy will have both an environmental and competitive advantage. The question is whether the industry will voluntarily address these concerns or wait for regulation to force their hand.

While the AI world grapples with ethical and environmental concerns, Google quietly dropped Gemini 3 this week. The new model arrives as competition in the large language model space reaches fever pitch, with companies racing to demonstrate continued progress in capabilities and performance.

Details about Gemini 3's specific improvements remain limited in the immediate release, but the timing is significant. Google has been under pressure to demonstrate it can compete with OpenAI's latest releases and Anthropic's Claude models. The 'Flash' branding suggests an emphasis on speed and efficiency—critical factors as companies try to make AI services more practical and cost-effective for everyday use. This focus on deployment efficiency could be Google's answer to the environmental criticism the industry is facing.

For developers and businesses, the release represents another option in an increasingly crowded field. But it also highlights a fundamental tension in the industry: companies continue pushing for more powerful models even as concerns about sustainability, copyright, and creative displacement intensify. Whether Gemini 3 addresses any of these concerns or simply adds to them remains to be seen as the model undergoes real-world testing.

Former UK Chancellor George Osborne has joined the AI industry in a move that highlights Big Tech's increasing focus on political influence. The hiring represents a broader pattern of AI companies recruiting prominent political figures as they face growing regulatory scrutiny.

The appointment raises questions about the revolving door between politics and Big Tech. As governments worldwide grapple with how to regulate AI—from copyright issues to environmental impacts to labor concerns—having former senior politicians on payroll gives companies insider access and credibility with policymakers. It's a strategy that's worked well for traditional tech giants, and AI companies are clearly learning from that playbook.

For Britain specifically, the move comes at a crucial moment. As the country develops its AI strategy post-Brexit, companies are positioning themselves to shape regulatory frameworks that will govern the industry for years to come. Whether this kind of political hiring helps create sensible regulation or simply ensures industry-friendly rules remains a critical question. The pattern of copyright reversals, actor rebellions, and environmental concerns suggests that public pressure may increasingly counter even well-connected corporate lobbying.

In unexpected news, Trump Media announced a $6 billion merger with fusion power company TAE. While not directly AI-related, the deal highlights how AI's massive energy demands are driving interest in next-generation power solutions. Fusion power, if achieved at scale, could theoretically provide the clean, abundant energy needed to address AI's growing environmental footprint. However, commercial fusion remains years away from viability, making this more of a speculative bet than an immediate solution to the sustainability crisis documented in this week's emissions report.

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This week marks a potential turning point for the AI industry. The Australian copyright reversal, actors' collective refusal to be scanned, and concrete data about environmental impacts suggest that unchecked AI expansion is meeting real resistance. Companies can no longer assume that innovation alone justifies any cost—to creators, to workers, or to the planet.

The question now is whether the industry will adapt proactively or reactively. Google's Gemini 3 release shows development continues at pace, but the surrounding controversies suggest that technical capability alone won't determine AI's future. How companies address sustainability, compensate creators, and respect workers' agency may ultimately matter more than benchmark scores. We're entering an era where social license to operate matters as much as technical achievement.