Hello and welcome to Screenshot, your weekly tech update from national technology reporter Ange Lavoipierre, featuring the best, worst and strangest in tech and online news. Read to the end for a catty Katy Perry take.
Is Australia snoozing through the AI gold rush? Our experts think so
Australia is falling behind on AI.
That's the increasingly loud message from industry and academia.
"This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out," said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.
It's not just about a cash grab, he told Screenshot — it's a matter of being left behind and becoming less prosperous overall.
"The primary risk for Australia is that we will not make the transition to an AI-enabled economy," Professor Walsh said.
The same message was delivered directly to the federal government this week at the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence.
"Compared to most of the countries that we like to compare ourselves to, we have been very slow to make the transition," Professor Anton Van Den Hengel, Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Machine Learning told the hearing.
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On the one hand, AI researchers calling for AI investment could be excused as motivated reasoning, but the numbers are telling.
"Since 2017, Australia has invested less than a tenth of Canada's budget in AI research and capability," Professor Walsh argued.
"Countries with equal or lower gross domestic product (GDP) than Australia's have invested billions."
One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI's ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.
"The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant," he said.
Why you're spending so long answering questions about cookies
Perhaps you have the patience of a saint, or perhaps you can relate to the feeling of wanting to hurl your computer out the nearest window (if only the damn thing would open) every time a new website asks you 52 questions about which cookies you would or would not like to accept.
Either way, it will bring you no comfort to know that Australians on average spend roughly 40 times longer than Europeans managing their privacy on individual websites.
Research from the Consumer Policy Research Centre claims Australians would need to spend two minutes on this task in order to achieve the result a German could in just 3.1 seconds.
Why the gap? The EU has much stronger privacy laws in place for consumers.
An overhaul of Australia's Privacy Act has been "on its way" for longer than the new Frank Ocean album but hark, we are (theoretically) a month away from delivery.
The changes have been in the works for four years, with a review process having begun under the Morrison government in 2019.
In May, the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, announced the bill would be brought forward to August from the end of the year, as part of the government's policy response to violence against women.
The signs have been promising, but not unlike Frank Ocean fans, the equally enthusiastic fans of changes to the Privacy Act are also wary of disappointment.
Consumer advocacy group CHOICE is leaving nothing to chance, delivering a petition with almost 33,000 signatures to the prime minister Anthony Albanese, the treasurer Jim Chalmers and Dreyfus today.
"CHOICE is urging the government to immediately implement essential reforms that will require businesses to act fairly and responsibly when using consumer data," said the group's consumer data advocate, Kate Bower.
And as angry as we are about the cookies, it's about much more than that.
"For too long, businesses in Australia have had a culture of rampant over-collection of data that has not only led to massive data breaches affecting millions of Australians, but facilitates unfair practices like price discrimination and manipulative data-driven marketing".
Theoretically, they won't have to wait much longer.
That said, when he was asked about the timeline at National Press Club last week, the attorney general was notably less specific about the month, saying "I'm very hopeful that we will bring [the bill] to the parliament later this year."
Cookie, anyone?
Leading chatbots are inaccurate about the Trump assassination attempt and that's a problem
Misinformation monitors NewsGuard have found that the 10 leading generative AI platforms failed to provide accurate information about the shooting of Donald Trump at a rally last weekend 57 per cent of the time.
Researchers tested OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, xAI's Grok, and Google's Gemini among others, and of the 10, only one successfully debunked false claims 100 per cent of the time.
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It's not exactly surprising, given the amount of misinformation that's been in circulation. But it is a worry, when you consider that chatbots are being embedded into consumer tech such as smartphones and search engines at a serious pace.
And there is a lot of misinformation out there. If you've been on social media in the past week, you'll know that the platforms lit up with lies. Some are claiming that Joe Biden had ordered the attack on Donald Trump, while others insist it was staged by Trump himself.
On X alone, NewsGuard found 308,000 mentions of the word "staged" and 83,000 mentions of the phrase "inside job" in the day following the rally.
Interestingly, researchers found that it was far more common that AI language models would give a non-answer, than an outright wrong answer.
Of the 57 per cent of answers that weren't accurate, only a fifth of those repeated falsehoods. The rest of the time, they would say they couldn't talk about politics, or words to that effect.
Is this progress? Sadly, yes.
And if it's all too much…
Then spare a thought for Katy Perry.
Lord knows most of the internet has this week and none of them have been kind, in the wake of her releasing a new single and video, Woman's World, intended as a comeback.
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My personal highlight was the moment she inserted a petrol hose into her butt cheek, but I'm sure you'll have your own.
If you've been on social media you'll know the takes have been catty, the tweets more so.
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But special praise must go to independent music critic Shaad D'Souza who ended their review of the track in Pitchfork with the following:
"In the immortal words of Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, uttered moments before she died: 'Katy Perry, please stop.'"
You can read more about the actual nun from LA Shaad refers to here.
As always, savage takes and story tips can be sent to angelavoipierre at protonmail dot com.
