Not using AI at work yet? You're already falling behind
When future historians look back on this period of work in a hundred year's time, there are two simple letters that will dominate their recounting: A and I.
The sudden rise of AI in the workplace, and its inevitable impact on every corner of our lives, will go down as one of the most axis-tilting shifts to the way that we work. Now, I'm not being overly dramatic here for no reason, the early advancements in AI are just the start of an exponential curve in front of us.
For years, many people assumed that robots would come for lower paid jobs first, like factory workers or front-of-house staff, before gradually working their way up the wage chain.
But the sudden arrival of generative AI (which can create content like reports and images) and agentic AI (where technology works autonomously on behalf of a user) has shown that no amount of higher education makes you immune from these trends.
Increasing AI adoption can bring on two extreme reactions: fear and excitement. Both are valid responses as we better understand the potential and dangers of this new technology, but whether we like it or not, AI is already being used in most workplaces.
Your colleagues and competitors are drafting emails, reviewing contracts, writing presentations, analysing data and using it to help with every task we used to think only other humans could do.
Use of AI programs, like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, can have immediate and immense impact on your day-to-day work.
However, the uptake is pretty uneven. A new Australian survey by Humanova found that mid-sized businesses with 50 to 99 employees are leading the charge when it comes to AI adoption. The report's author, Dr Sean Gallagher, says the reason for this is that just over a third of employees of firms this size are 'power users' who are currently using AI at least daily.
If you're not one of them, there's a real and growing risk that you might become professionally obsolete as those around you transform their roles through AI.
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The Age
33 minutes ago
- The Age
Police searched the man's laptop for malware. What they found is becoming all too common
'We have commercial image generation sites that you can go to right now, and you don't even have to look for child sexual abuse material because the generation of [it] is so popular that these sites often have trending pages, and I've seen sections where the keyword is 'pre-teen', or 'tween', or 'very young'.' In a 2024 report, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found a 380 per cent increase in reported cases of AI-generated child sexual abuse content online, noting that the material was becoming 'significantly more realistic' and that perpetrators were finding 'more success generating complex 'hardcore' scenarios' involving penetrative sexual activity, bestiality or sadism. 'One user shared an anonymous webpage containing links to fine-tuned models for 128 different named victims of child sexual abuse.' Internet Watch Foundation's July 2024 AI child sexual abuse material report The IWF found evidence that AI models that depict known child abuse victims and famous children were being created and shared online. In some of the most perverse cases, this could include the re-victimisation of 'popular' real-life child abuse victims, with AI models allowing perpetrators to generate new images of an abused minor. The report acknowledged that the usage of these fine-tuned models, known as LoRAs, likely went much deeper than the IWF could assess, thanks to end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer networks that were essentially inaccessible. Moreover, Australia's eSafety Commission warns that child sexual abuse material produced by AI is 'highly scalable'. '[It requires] little effort to reproduce en masse once a model is capable of generating illegal imagery,' a spokesperson said. Commercial interests The rapid escalation of the amount of content available online is partially attributed to how AI has enabled the commercialisation of child sexual abuse material. 'Offenders who are quite adept at creating material are essentially taking orders to produce content, and this material is increasingly realistic,' Salter says. Jones says that in the span of his career, he's seen the provision of child sexual abuse content go from physical photocopies being shared in small groups to it being available online in a couple of clicks. 'Unfortunately, there is a particular audience for child sexual abuse material, and what AI can do is generate that content, so [commercialisation] is serving a demand that is out there.' In one of the biggest stings involving an AI-child abuse enterprise, Danish police, in conjunction with Europol, uncovered a subscription service that commercialised access to the content. The global operation saw two Australian men charged, and 23 others apprehended around the world. 'There were over 237 subscribers to that one matter,' Moses says of Operation Cumberland. 'When we talk about proliferation and people profiting from this type of activity, this is of great concern to us.' Swamped by the growing sea of content, officers now face the difficulty of identifying which situations depict real children being abused, as opposed to an AI-generated child who doesn't exist. 'It also means that police have to spend quite a lot of time looking at material to determine whether it's real or not, which is quite a serious trauma risk for police as well,' Salter says. Moses from the ACCCE agrees that it's 'very difficult work' for officers. 'Whilst it is very confronting material, it doesn't compare to the trauma that child victims endure, and there's very much a focus on identifying victims.' The influx of AI-generated content has complicated its mission in many ways, Moses says, including by robbing crucial resources from ACCCE's primary goal of rescuing children who are being abused. 'It takes a lot of time to identify real victims, and the concern for us ... is that the [AI-generated content] is becoming increasingly harder [to detect], and it takes time away from our people who are trying to identify real victims.' Law enforcement 'overwhelmed' While prosecutions for offences involving fake abuse material have increased, the rate hasn't kept up with the pace of the increase in the amount of content found online. Salter says resourcing is one of the biggest challenges facing law enforcement. 'Law enforcement is so overwhelmed with really egregious online sexual exploitation cases … their primary priority is to prevent and rescue the abuse of actual kids.' He says it's a struggle he's heard across all jurisdictions. 'They're really struggling in terms of people power, in terms of access to the technology that they need to conduct these investigations and to store that amount of material,' Salter says. 'There needs to be a huge uplift right across the law enforcement space.' Additionally, AI-generated child sexual abuse content requires a whole reset of the way the content is detected. Old machine methods of detecting the content online involved scraping for verified abuse content, which means it has to have already been assessed by a human as illegal content to be detected. 'The obvious challenge we see with AI-generated material is that it's all new, and so it's very unlikely, through current detection technologies, that we can proactively screen it,' Salter says. Unregulated threat let loose It's a global issue that crosses jurisdictions and exists on the internet's severely under-regulated new frontier. But that hasn't deterred Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, from introducing world-first industry standards to hold tech companies to account for the content they platform. The standards came into force in December 2024 and require storage services like Apple's iCloud and Google Drive, messaging services, and online marketplaces that offer generative AI models to prevent their products from being misused to store or distribute child sexual abuse material and pro-terror content. 'We have engaged with both AI purveyors and the platforms and libraries that host them to ensure they are aware of their obligations under the standards,' an eSafety commission spokesperson said. 'We believe the standards are a significant step in regulating unlawful and seriously harmful content and align with our broader efforts to ensure that AI tools, such as those used to create deepfakes, are held to the highest safety standards.' The recent passage of the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 also expanded on the available criminal offences relating to non-consensual, sexually explicit AI-generated material. While international companies can face multi-million dollar penalties for breaches of the eSafety Commission's standards in Australia, major tech players like Meta are increasingly adopting end-to-end encryption, which means even the companies themselves can't see what content they're hosting, let alone law enforcement. Interpol works at the forefront of these issues, often acting as a bridge between authorities and the private sector. Jones observes that while interventions like Australia's new standards play an important role in setting high standards for tech companies, encryption and other privacy policies make it 'very hard for law enforcement to get those data sets'. International cooperation is crucial for successfully prosecuting commercial child sexual abuse content cases, and Jones says that in best practice examples, when a global chain is identified, the tech industry is brought in as part of the investigation. 'I'm seeing more of an involvement in the tech sector around supporting law enforcement. But that's sometimes at odds with encryption and things like that,' Jones says. Loading 'I think the tech industry has a duty of care to the communities that they serve. So I don't think it's good enough to say, 'Oh, well, it's encrypted. We don't know what's there'.' Salter takes a more pessimistic view of the tech industry's actions, arguing that most companies are moving away from, not towards, proactively monitoring the presence of child sexual abuse content. 'The emergence of AI has been something of a vortex of doom in the online child protection space,' Salter says. Online child protection efforts were already overwhelmed, he says, before the tech sector 'created a new threat to children' and 'released [it] into the wild with no child protection safeguards'. 'And that's very typical behaviour.'
Sydney Morning Herald
38 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Police searched the man's laptop for malware. What they found is becoming all too common
'We have commercial image generation sites that you can go to right now, and you don't even have to look for child sexual abuse material because the generation of [it] is so popular that these sites often have trending pages, and I've seen sections where the keyword is 'pre-teen', or 'tween', or 'very young'.' In a 2024 report, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found a 380 per cent increase in reported cases of AI-generated child sexual abuse content online, noting that the material was becoming 'significantly more realistic' and that perpetrators were finding 'more success generating complex 'hardcore' scenarios' involving penetrative sexual activity, bestiality or sadism. 'One user shared an anonymous webpage containing links to fine-tuned models for 128 different named victims of child sexual abuse.' Internet Watch Foundation's July 2024 AI child sexual abuse material report The IWF found evidence that AI models that depict known child abuse victims and famous children were being created and shared online. In some of the most perverse cases, this could include the re-victimisation of 'popular' real-life child abuse victims, with AI models allowing perpetrators to generate new images of an abused minor. The report acknowledged that the usage of these fine-tuned models, known as LoRAs, likely went much deeper than the IWF could assess, thanks to end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer networks that were essentially inaccessible. Moreover, Australia's eSafety Commission warns that child sexual abuse material produced by AI is 'highly scalable'. '[It requires] little effort to reproduce en masse once a model is capable of generating illegal imagery,' a spokesperson said. Commercial interests The rapid escalation of the amount of content available online is partially attributed to how AI has enabled the commercialisation of child sexual abuse material. 'Offenders who are quite adept at creating material are essentially taking orders to produce content, and this material is increasingly realistic,' Salter says. Jones says that in the span of his career, he's seen the provision of child sexual abuse content go from physical photocopies being shared in small groups to it being available online in a couple of clicks. 'Unfortunately, there is a particular audience for child sexual abuse material, and what AI can do is generate that content, so [commercialisation] is serving a demand that is out there.' In one of the biggest stings involving an AI-child abuse enterprise, Danish police, in conjunction with Europol, uncovered a subscription service that commercialised access to the content. The global operation saw two Australian men charged, and 23 others apprehended around the world. 'There were over 237 subscribers to that one matter,' Moses says of Operation Cumberland. 'When we talk about proliferation and people profiting from this type of activity, this is of great concern to us.' Swamped by the growing sea of content, officers now face the difficulty of identifying which situations depict real children being abused, as opposed to an AI-generated child who doesn't exist. 'It also means that police have to spend quite a lot of time looking at material to determine whether it's real or not, which is quite a serious trauma risk for police as well,' Salter says. Moses from the ACCCE agrees that it's 'very difficult work' for officers. 'Whilst it is very confronting material, it doesn't compare to the trauma that child victims endure, and there's very much a focus on identifying victims.' The influx of AI-generated content has complicated its mission in many ways, Moses says, including by robbing crucial resources from ACCCE's primary goal of rescuing children who are being abused. 'It takes a lot of time to identify real victims, and the concern for us ... is that the [AI-generated content] is becoming increasingly harder [to detect], and it takes time away from our people who are trying to identify real victims.' Law enforcement 'overwhelmed' While prosecutions for offences involving fake abuse material have increased, the rate hasn't kept up with the pace of the increase in the amount of content found online. Salter says resourcing is one of the biggest challenges facing law enforcement. 'Law enforcement is so overwhelmed with really egregious online sexual exploitation cases … their primary priority is to prevent and rescue the abuse of actual kids.' He says it's a struggle he's heard across all jurisdictions. 'They're really struggling in terms of people power, in terms of access to the technology that they need to conduct these investigations and to store that amount of material,' Salter says. 'There needs to be a huge uplift right across the law enforcement space.' Additionally, AI-generated child sexual abuse content requires a whole reset of the way the content is detected. Old machine methods of detecting the content online involved scraping for verified abuse content, which means it has to have already been assessed by a human as illegal content to be detected. 'The obvious challenge we see with AI-generated material is that it's all new, and so it's very unlikely, through current detection technologies, that we can proactively screen it,' Salter says. Unregulated threat let loose It's a global issue that crosses jurisdictions and exists on the internet's severely under-regulated new frontier. But that hasn't deterred Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, from introducing world-first industry standards to hold tech companies to account for the content they platform. The standards came into force in December 2024 and require storage services like Apple's iCloud and Google Drive, messaging services, and online marketplaces that offer generative AI models to prevent their products from being misused to store or distribute child sexual abuse material and pro-terror content. 'We have engaged with both AI purveyors and the platforms and libraries that host them to ensure they are aware of their obligations under the standards,' an eSafety commission spokesperson said. 'We believe the standards are a significant step in regulating unlawful and seriously harmful content and align with our broader efforts to ensure that AI tools, such as those used to create deepfakes, are held to the highest safety standards.' The recent passage of the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 also expanded on the available criminal offences relating to non-consensual, sexually explicit AI-generated material. While international companies can face multi-million dollar penalties for breaches of the eSafety Commission's standards in Australia, major tech players like Meta are increasingly adopting end-to-end encryption, which means even the companies themselves can't see what content they're hosting, let alone law enforcement. Interpol works at the forefront of these issues, often acting as a bridge between authorities and the private sector. Jones observes that while interventions like Australia's new standards play an important role in setting high standards for tech companies, encryption and other privacy policies make it 'very hard for law enforcement to get those data sets'. International cooperation is crucial for successfully prosecuting commercial child sexual abuse content cases, and Jones says that in best practice examples, when a global chain is identified, the tech industry is brought in as part of the investigation. 'I'm seeing more of an involvement in the tech sector around supporting law enforcement. But that's sometimes at odds with encryption and things like that,' Jones says. Loading 'I think the tech industry has a duty of care to the communities that they serve. So I don't think it's good enough to say, 'Oh, well, it's encrypted. We don't know what's there'.' Salter takes a more pessimistic view of the tech industry's actions, arguing that most companies are moving away from, not towards, proactively monitoring the presence of child sexual abuse content. 'The emergence of AI has been something of a vortex of doom in the online child protection space,' Salter says. Online child protection efforts were already overwhelmed, he says, before the tech sector 'created a new threat to children' and 'released [it] into the wild with no child protection safeguards'. 'And that's very typical behaviour.'
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Power bills got you sweating? Stay warm without spending a fortune
Real Money, a free weekly newsletter giving expert tips on how to save, invest and make the most of your money, is sent every Sunday. You're reading an excerpt − sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox. As I write this on a frosty Melbourne morning, the mercury has dipped below 3 degrees, prompting the ritualistic donning of black puffer jackets and a sharp spike in the number of people working from home. I've heard it's also quite cold in Sydney but, frankly, whatever goes on north of the Murray River is none of my business. Scientists have also discovered that cold weather is often associated with thoughts such as 'oh my god I'm never going to be warm again' and 'can I do everything I need to get do today from bed?' It can also see many of us crank our heating up to ridiculous levels, which is great for short-term relief but bad from a power bill perspective. This is especially problematic for those of us with large or poorly insulated houses (so, basically, all of us, as 80 per cent of Australian houses have a two star or less energy rating). What's the problem? To make matters worse, energy prices are on the up. Power prices are set to rise by up to 9.7 per cent in NSW and 5 per cent in Victoria from July 1, after the market regulator announced its latest round of annual price setting. These rises are just an estimate too, as calculations by Canstar show that over the past six years, 67 per cent of the actual prices ended up higher than the proposed price. All in all, it's shaping up as a bad year to be cold. What you can do about it So if the chill is creeping a little too much for your liking (and it's only June!), here are some moves you can make: Shop around: You can put on as many jumpers as you like, or stack on three more blankets, but nothing will save you as much money as jumping ship to a new energy retailer. Comparison expert at iSelect, Sophie Ryan, says everyone should get on the front foot now and check how your current energy offer stacks up – including what your service and supply fees are. 'While power prices may be higher across the board and will increase further for many homes from July 1, there are still differences between retailers and plans, and even a small price difference could make a big difference to a quarterly energy bill,' she says. It's a common misconception (and something that I ramble on about all the time) that loyalty pays, but it doesn't. Your energy provider owes you nothing, and vice versa, so if another one is offering a better deal (even if it's just a one-off for new customers), go get it. The government even has a free, independent energy price comparing tool which you can access here.
