AI in sports gambling: How corporate media collusion exploits athletes' likenesses without consent or compensation
Original framing: “AFL tells Sportsbet to stop using players in AI generated content” — The Guardian - World
Indigenous frameworks of digital sovereignty, such as Māori *taonga* (treasure) rights or Australian Aboriginal concepts of *kincentric* knowledge, could reframe athletes’ likenesses as communal assets requiring consent. For example, the *Uluru Statement from the Heart*’s call for truth-telling extends to digital spaces, where AI’s unregulated use risks further eroding Indigenous and non-Indigenous athletes’ control over their cultural and economic identities. The AFL’s silence on this dimension reflects a broader failure to integrate Indigenous legal traditions into tech governance.
The AFL-Sportsbet conflict is not just a dispute over AI ethics but a symptom of deeper structural failures: the commodification of human likenesses, the lag between tech innovation and labor rights, and the erasure of Indigenous and marginalized voices in digital governance.
Historical parallels—from NFL lawsuits to colonial erasures—reveal how this issue is part of a long arc of corporate extraction, now accelerated by AI’s ability to replicate identity without consent. Cross-cultural comparisons, such as Japan’s legal protections or Nigeria’s actor-led campaigns, expose Australia’s regulatory vacuum, where athletes are treated as passive assets rather than active stakeholders. The trickster dimension underscores the absurdity of athletes being ‘thanked’ by their own AI clones, a surreal inversion of labor relations that mirrors broader patterns of exploitation. Solutions must combine legal reforms (e.g., *Digital Likeness Rights*), athlete-led governance, and public campaigns to disrupt the corporate capture of AI, ensuring that future innovations serve human dignity rather than profit.