Tech lords are promising us utopia. Their brave new world might be a dump
In July, Elon Musk's chatbot, Grok, was updated and promptly started spewing antisemitic and other toxic content.
Earlier this month was the disastrous launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT-5. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had promised users that it would be like talking to 'a PhD level expert in anything', but within hours of the launch, epic fails started to flood in.
One user asked GPT-5 to generate a map of the United States with each state named, which is how we all learned about the great states of Aphadris, Wiscubsjia and Misfrani. It also had problems counting to 12, and referred to President Gearge Washingion. These kinds of inaccuracies are initially hilarious, until we realise we're drowning in a sea of online misinformation and the joke's on us.
Nevertheless, we're repeatedly told that the AI spaceship is leaving for a brave new world, so we'd better get on board or risk being left behind. Unfortunately, the people steering the spaceship appear to have lost their moral compass. So where exactly we're headed remains unclear.
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Australia does not currently have AI-specific legislation. Chair of the Tech Council of Australia, Scott Farquhar, prefers it that way, stating that he doesn't want Australia to be 'hampered by the wrong legislation'.
The right legislation, according to the council, is a text and data mining exemption to the Copyright Act, which would allow AI companies to use copyrighted work to train their large language models without seeking consent or paying authors a cent. Their illogical argument is that the work of Australian artists is immeasurably valuable, while simultaneously worth nothing at all.
The council's lobbying effort at the Economic Reform Roundtable this week will also push for Australia to build more data centres, the huge energy- and water-guzzling facilities which provide the vast power, storage and cooling requirements that AI requires. Farquhar has repeatedly argued that Australia should become a regional data centre hub, saying: 'I think we are going to have a huge amount of benefits (from AI) and I hope we as a nation set ourselves up to have some of those benefits accrue to Australia.'
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