While the rest of the world loses its collective mind over artificial intelligence, Tasmania is sitting on an amazing competitive advantage… and might be about to throw it away by jumping on the AI bandwagon.
Everything that makes Tasmania economically successful is the exact opposite of what AI represents. And if Tasmanian businesses start chasing AI “efficiency” instead of leveraging their authentic advantages, they’ll transform from premium producers into generic commodity suppliers. Let’s start with the obvious: Tasmania didn’t build its reputation by being like everywhere else. The state that turned geographic isolation into "the quiet pursuit of the extraordinary" succeeded precisely because it rejected the bigger-faster-cheaper mentality that dominates global business. Brand Tasmania explicitly warns against becoming “beige and ordinary”, which is literally AI’s business model: statistical averaging toward the most probable (read: boring) output.
While Silicon Valley burns through more electricity than entire countries to power matrix multiplications that fundamentally just predict the next most likely word, Tasmania achieved 100% renewable electricity generation and has maintained net zero emissions for ten consecutive years. ChatGPT alone consumes 621.4 MWh daily, enough to power around 52 homes for an entire year, just to generate text that researchers find has significantly less creativity than human writing. We know that AI data centres can cause grid instability, and no matter the means of generation, this kind of instability can be a “big hammer” on our electricity grids. Tasmania would be trading its clearcut clean energy advantage for computational excess that produces inferior results and potentially damages or has severe negative impacts on our infrastructure.
Consider what actually drives Tasmania’s economic success. The island’s whisky distilleries don’t compete on volume; they win international competitions through patient craftsmanship and unique local conditions. Salamanca Market’s 100s of artisan stalls command premium prices precisely because most of their products have provenance, character, and human stories, not because they’ve been optimised to be the statistical average. Tourism Tasmania’s "Odd Jobs" campaign generated 1.3 billion global impressions because it felt authentically weird and wonderful, exactly what AI is designed to eliminate, no matter how much you ask it to be quirky.
The state has already recognised this tension with the brilliant TasmanAI campaign, which perfectly subverted the AI hype. Instead of artificial intelligence generating images in seconds, TasmanAI invited people to submit prompts that real Tasmanian artists then transform into actual paintings, illustrations, and drawings. The campaign received over 5,000 prompts from around the world and delivered unique artworks created by nine local artists working in ceramics, acrylics, oil, and crayon. As BMF, the agency behind the campaign, put it: "databases of stolen jpegs are no match for Tasmania’s wealth of artistic talent."
Now imagine if these businesses started using AI to “optimise” their operations. Picture Lark Distillery feeding their whisky recipes through a neural network trained on “maximum market appeal” datasets. Envision Salamanca woodworkers replacing their craft knowledge with AI-generated designs optimised for production efficiency metrics. Consider Tourism Tasmania swapping their delightfully odd human creativity for transformer-generated marketing copy lacking both soul and a genuine connection to anything Tasmanian.
The result wouldn’t be efficiency, it would be the complete destruction of everything that makes Tasmanian products worth premium prices! You’d have algorithmic whisky, mass-produced “crafts” optimised by algorithms, and tourism campaigns as social media slop. Tasmania would transform from a distinctive premium brand into just another place trying to compete on price with automated alternatives. And it can’t do that.
The productivity promises driving AI adoption aren’t even real. The most rigorous independent research reveals that AI often makes things worse. A 2025 study of experienced software developers found they were 19% slower when using AI tools, despite expecting to be 24% faster—classic human-computer interaction failure mode. The Danish workplace study across 7,000 workplaces found AI delivered only 3% average time savings with “no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.” Harvard researchers discovered AI’s "jagged frontier" problem—tasks outside AI’s training distribution were 19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions. It’s almost like these systems are just really expensive autocomplete functions with confidence intervals they can’t calculate…
For Tasmanian businesses built on quality and authenticity, these marginal time savings (if they exist at all) come at catastrophic cost. Trading craftsmanship for algorithmic averaging doesn’t just reduce quality, it eliminates the differentiators that justify premium pricing. When your competitive advantage depends on being distinctively Tasmanian, optimising toward statistical averages is business suicide with extra steps and GPU costs.
The legal landscape makes AI adoption even more problematic for authentic producers. Courts are rejecting fair use defences for AI companies, with many copyright lawsuits currently pending. Research shows up to 15% of AI text output overlaps with existing internet content, and AI models retain approximately 1% of training data in memory, which is exactly what you’d expect from systems that fundamentally work by pattern matching against vast databases of other people’s work. Tasmanian businesses would be risking their reputations on tools that systematically infringe intellectual property when their success depends on authentic originality.
The environmental contradiction is equally stark. While Google’s emissions jumped 48% and Microsoft’s water consumption increased 87% due to AI infrastructure, Tasmania markets itself on clean, green credentials. The state’s renewable energy leadership and environmental responsibility are core brand differentiators. Trading that for the computational equivalent of strip mining makes little sense.
Instead of chasing AI “efficiency,” Tasmanian businesses should double down on their authentic advantages. As AI floods global markets with generic content and products (hello, model collapse, when AI systems trained on AI-generated content produce increasingly homogeneous outputs), human-made alternatives become more valuable, not less. When everything is algorithmic, authenticity commands premium prices. When every experience is optimised by reinforcement learning, genuine human connections become rare and precious.
Tasmania’s "Come Down for Air" campaign already positions the state as an escape from digital overwhelm. This messaging becomes more powerful as AI-driven homogenisation accelerates globally. Rather than joining the algorithmic race to the bottom, Tasmania can explicitly market itself as the anti-AI alternative: the place where humans still make things, tell stories, and create experiences that matter without needing transformer architectures or attention mechanisms.
The opportunity is enormous. As AI companies struggle with fundamental computational limitations, overfitting, hallucination, catastrophic forgetting, and the inability to truly understand context beyond statistical correlation, Tasmania’s commitment to human creativity becomes a competitive moat. While others optimise for efficiency and scale, Tasmania can optimise for quality and character. While others chase algorithmic solutions that are fundamentally just very expensive pattern matching, Tasmania can celebrate human solutions that actually understand meaning.
This doesn’t mean Tasmanian businesses should avoid all technology! Strategic use of renewable energy, sustainable production methods, and digital marketing that showcases authentic stories can enhance rather than replace human creativity. The key is using technology to amplify what makes Tasmania special, not to optimise it away.
If you, as a Tasmanian business or creator of some kind, think “great, now that I have this tool I can do more and that will let me compete with my current competitors who are able to do more than I am”, for whatever value of more is relevant (designing more products, writing more copy on your website, doing more social media engagement, translating content so you can sell your stuff to more places, whatever), then remember that those competitors have access to the same tools and because of the nature of exponential capability growth, they will be able to do more more than you can.
The gap only widens when a small entity tries to leverage technologies or even techniques that everyone has access to: they cannot compete at scale.
The choice is clear: Tasmania can chase AI “efficiency” and become indistinguishable from everywhere else, or it can leverage its authentic advantages to command premium prices in markets increasingly hungry for genuine alternatives. The state that turned isolation into distinction can turn the AI revolution into its greatest competitive advantage, by consciously choosing to remain human.
Header image inspired by Tourism Tasmania’s TasmanAi campaign. “TasmanAI” is used without permission or endorsement, implied or otherwise.