Emotional AI and the Consensus-Based Remuneration Regime in Southeast Asia

Some emotional generative AI (GenAI) companies have acquired the power to extract copyright-protected works from anyone in their orbit without prior authorisation. Such monopolistic abuses could potentially disrupt the market for these copyrighted works, thereby forming the basis for numerous lawsuits across multiple jurisdictions. Indeed, the creative industry will be greatly affected by this phenomenon, let alone rights-holders in the Global South including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (the ASEAN) who have been suffering from ineffective copyright enforcement and restricted freedom of expression for generations. This chapter discusses how to remunerate rights-holders whose work is unlawfully used to train GenAI systems, focusing on the ASEAN and how their non-interference principle (the ASEAN Way) could address this issue. Moreover, a limited Brussels Effect on Text- and Data-Mining (TDM) regulation in the ASEAN is presented. This chapter finds that the ASEAN Way remains relevant to serve as the foundation for remunerating rights-holders in the ASEAN. Furthermore, this chapter proposes that through the Initiation of GenAI Training Remuneration (TDR), stakeholders, following the spirit of ‘Gotong Royong’ in the Malay Archipelago, could achieve a consensus on a pro-rata model on the amount and method of remuneration for machine learning by emotional GenAI applications.