Latest news with #DavidMarr
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
David Marr follows Sam Maiden to the exit after Honi Soit withdraws speaking invitation
Before Samantha Maiden was the Gold Walkley award-winning political editor of she was editor of the student newspaper On Dit at Adelaide University. So, in the spirit of collegiality, when she was invited in March to speak at the Student Journalism Conference to be held by Honi Soit at the University of Sydney in August, she accepted the offer. After all, the hosts were fawning, saying they 'would be honoured to hear you speak, and it would really be a highlight of the conference'. But this week their sentiments changed dramatically. 'We have received community concerns about your political coverage and reporting on the Palestinian genocide,' the organisers said in an email to Maiden. 'As a left-wing newspaper, Honi Soit recognises that Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Palestine and we do not feel that our values align, or that we can platform your work as a result.' Maiden had been de-platformed. 'The truly weird aspect of this bizarre cancelling is I don't recall writing anything about Palestine recently at all, let alone anything controversial,' Maiden wrote on Thursday. 'I have literally no idea what they are on about, and regardless, even if I had written something or said something controversial that the Honi Soit editors did not agree with, so what?' Enter David Marr, another distinguished journalist who had agreed to speak at the conference. When the ABC's new Late Night Live host heard Maiden had been 'de-platformed' he told organisers their decision was 'not my idea of how a good newspaper – let alone a student paper – should behave'. 'Isn't the point of Honi Soit and a conference of this kind to examine different – and perhaps uncomfortable views – about the big issues of the day? I'm out. David Marr.' Honi Soit replied, telling Marr they wanted to 'create a safe place for our student community'. 'If we had not decided to uninvite Samantha in light of the complaints we have received, there was a high likelihood that there may have been protests or boycotts on the day of the event,' editors wrote in an email seen by Weekly Beast. This incensed Marr, who has asked them to explain what they mean by 'safe place'. 'Do you fear violence? Who would be to blame if it broke out? Sam Maiden? Are you afraid of boycotts and demonstrations? Haven't they been part and parcel of university politics for ever?' Marr: 'When the great issue facing universities – here & abroad – is the right to speak freely about Gaza in the face of those determined to outlaw those views, doesn't deplatforming speakers YOU don't want heard show you behaving just as badly as them?' The Student Journalism Conference's social media account has not caught up with Maiden's cancellation. On Friday it was still promoting Maiden and Marr as speakers. While factcheckers have debunked claims travellers who intend to visit Australia are accidentally buying tickets to Austria, some journalists are still getting the two countries mixed up. Not even the great New York Times is immune, this week posting on social media that it was an Australian publication which was responsible for a fake 'exclusive' interview with Clint Eastwood. It was of course the German-language Austrian newspaper Kurier which published the cobbled together piece. 'Clint Eastwood has accused an Australian publication of running a fake interview with him,' the NYT Bluesky account claimed. Published on Wednesday, the post was still live on Friday. It's not often that News Corp and the NRL are not in lockstep. But the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age reported on Friday the top brass at the Murdoch newspapers 'boycotted the offer of NRL hospitality at last week's State of Origin match in Brisbane amid a war of words with Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V'landys'. V'landys was not happy with a series in the Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail and Code Sports about rugby league player-agents which revealed 62% of agents believed drug use is a problem with players. The editor of the Telegraph, Ben English, told SMH sports reporter Michael Chammas: 'It was great journalism, it was really topical and it provoked some constructive conversations about the future of the game. It's exactly the sort of journalism we should be doing. If different stakeholders, such as the NRL, didn't have an issue with what we write, we wouldn't be doing our job.' Credit where credit is due. While editors boycotted the game, the Herald noted, the News Corp chairman, Lachlan Murdoch, was all too happy to take in the Brisbane match from his private suite. News Corp Australia has embraced the use of AI for its illustrations in recent years. And not just illustrations. Guardian Australia revealed in 2023 the media company was producing 3,000 articles a week using generative artificial intelligence. In recent years ChatGPT often replaces newspaper photography or commissioned art on Daily Telegraph opinion pieces, which we told you about last year. But the use of AI on a piece this week caught our eye. 'AI is coming for your job,' the article said. 'You've probably been hearing this for months, or even years, but now it's happening. 'Many questions remain unanswered – how will it happen? And what are the jobs AI is already taking?' The story quoted University of Technology Sydney professor Giuseppe Carabetta, who said jobs across all levels of the service industries were being offloaded to AI. Were the editors aware of the irony of the image they chose to illustrate the article? The caption on the image read: 'Mr Carabetta said the AI job takeover is already happening. Picture: AI generated'. The Victorian supreme court trial over a beef wellington lunch that left three in-laws dead has attracted intense media interest, extending beyond local media to international outlets and the attendance of celebrated writer Helen Garner. And then there are the podcasts, which are, well, mushrooming. But the strict rules for reporting the trial of Erin Patterson have slipped up a few media outlets as well as people posting on Facebook. Our reporters on the ground, Nino Bucci and Adeshola Ore, say a suppression order on some names was breached by outlets including Crikey and the ABC. The ABC's popular podcast Mushroom Case Daily with reporter Rachael Brown and producer Stephen Stockwell inadvertently breached the order but it has since been rectified. The former editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review, Michael Stutchbury, took the well-worn path of former conservative leaning editors and joined a centre-right thinktank this week. Stutch, 68, served less than a year as editor-at-large and left the paper to become the executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). He replaces Tom Switzer, a former opinion editor at The Australian and editorial writer at the Australian Financial Review. Earlier this year, The Australian's former economics editor and Washington correspondent, Adam Creighton, joined the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) as a senior fellow and chief economist. He still writes a column for The Australian. Joining the AFR this week – but not replacing Stutch – is Kate de Brito, the former editor-in-chief of and Kidspot, editor-in-chief of Mamamia and head of digital for the News Corp editorial network. Until 2023, de Brito was executive editor of Foxtel's news streaming service, Flash. She has been appointed deputy editor news, replacing Jessica Gardner, who has become US correspondent.
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
I have been an AI researcher for 40 years. What tech giants are doing to book publishing is akin to theft
Australia's close-knit literary community – from writers and agents through to the Australian Society of Authors – have reacted with outrage. Black Inc, the publisher of the Quarterly Essay as well as fiction and nonfiction books by many prominent writers, had asked consent from its authors to train AI models on their work and then share the revenue with those authors. Now I have a dog in this race. Actually two dogs. I have published four books with Black Inc, have a fifth coming out next month, and have a contract for a sixth by the end of the year. And I have also been an AI researcher for 40 years, training AI models with data. I signed Black Inc's deal. Yes, the publisher could have communicated its intent with more transparency and a little less urgency. With whom exactly is it trying to sign a deal? And for what? And why only give us a few days to sign? But all in all, I am sympathetic to where Black Inc finds itself. Small publishers such as Black Inc provide a valuable service to Australian literature and to our cultural heritage. No one starts a new publisher to make big money. Indeed, many small publishers are struggling to survive in a market dominated by the Big Five. For example, Penguin Random House – the world's largest general book publisher – recently acquired one of Australia's leading independent publishers, the Text Publishing Company. Publishing is like venture capital. Most books lose money. Publishers make a return with the occasional bestseller. Small publishers like Black Inc nurture new Australian authors. And they publish many works that are worthy but are unlikely to make a profit. I am grateful then for their support of my modest literary career, and of the esteemed company I share, authors such as Richard Flanagan, David Marr and Noel Pearson. But I am outraged. I am outraged at the tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta for training their AI models, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Llama, on my copyrighted books without either my consent or offering me or Black Inc any compensation. I told Black Inc that this was happening in early 2023. They asked how I knew since the tech companies are lacking in transparency on their training data. I told them that ChatGPT could give you a good summary of Chapter 4 of my first book. The tech companies claim this is 'fair use'. I don't see it this way. Last year, at the Sydney Writers' festival, I called it the greatest heist in human history. All of human culture is being ingested into these AI models for the profit of a few technology companies. To add insult to outrage, the tech companies didn't even pay for the copy of my book or likely the tens of thousand other books they used to train their models. My book isn't available freely online. And, as far as I can tell, they trained on an illegal copy in books3, an online dataset assembled by Russian pirates. That's not fair. Nor is it sustainable. We're at the Napster moment in the AI race. When we started streaming music in the early 2000s, most of it was stolen. That wasn't going to work in the long run. Who could afford to be a musician if no one paid for music? Napster was shortly sued out of business. And streaming services such as Spotify started, which paid musicians for their labours. Streaming is still not perfect. Popular artists like Taylor Swift make a good living, but the pennies being returned to struggling musicians for their streams is arguably still inadequate. Publishing needs to go in a similar direction as streaming. And for that to happen, small publishers especially need a strong position to negotiate with the mighty tech companies. I therefore signed Black Inc's contract. It is, in my view, the lesser of the two evils. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion It is outrageous how the British government is trying to sell out artists with their proposed changes to copyright law. The controversial changes would allow AI developers to train their models on any material to which they have lawful access, and would require creators to proactively opt out to stop their work from being used. It is outrageous that the technology companies argue that AI models being trained on books is no different from humans reading a copyrighted book. It's not. It's a different scale. The AI models are trained on more books than a human could read in a lifetime of reading. And, as the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI argues, it's taking business away from publishers that is keeping them alive. Imagine a future where these large AI models ingest all of our digital knowledge. Not just books. All of science. All of our cultural knowledge. All of personal knowledge. This is Big Brother but not exactly as Orwell imagined. It is not a government, but a large tech company that will know more about us and the world than a human could possibly comprehend. Imagine also that these companies use all this information to manipulate what we do and what we buy in ways that we couldn't begin to understand. Perhaps the most beautiful part of this digital heist is that all of this knowledge is being stolen in broad daylight. Napster was a rather minor and petty crime in comparison. Toby Walsh is professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney
