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ABC News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
What the piano means to me: Jeremy Fernandez and Megan Burslem
Like many of us, ABC presenters Jeremy Fernandez's and Megan Burslem's first memories of the piano are from their childhood lessons. Fernandez started learning when he was seven and played until he was in his early twenties. He still plays from time to time, on the piano his parents bought when he started learning. It's served three generations in the family home. In the small town of Lakes Entrance, Victoria, Burslem had lessons from the wife of the local Anglican priest. Burslem's instrument of choice went on to be the viola, but the piano would remain an important companion during her music studies. As the pair get ready to host a celebration of one of Australia's favourite instruments in the Classic 100 in Concert, we asked them what the piano means to them. Jeremy Fernandez: …it arriving in the driveway of our home, and watching it being heaved off a truck by a group of men who prised it out of its wooden casing and positioned it in the lounge room where I would learn to play. I remember gazing up at the hulking mass of rosewood, and black and white keys, filled with excitement and trepidation at the thought of conquering this glimmering beast with my feet literally off the ground. Megan Burslem: ...Suzuki piano lessons from Mrs Lenthall, who was the local Anglican priest's wife. I used to go to the front room of their house and have piano lessons on their old upright piano. And I could never read a note. But I pretended that I could. Jeremy: ...I come from quite a musical family of people who played everything from the piano, guitar, ukelele, and violin, to spoons and buckets for family 'jam sessions' during which everyone would dance. It always struck me that the piano had such an enormous range, and it's still my favourite form of expression. Megan: ...It's an instrument that has guided me in the world of classical music in so many different iterations. We often play alongside the piano when we're learning our instruments as a viola player, and then I fell in love with piano music when it came to piano concertos. Jeremy: ...To me, the piano can mimic the sound of a teardrop, perfect stillness, or joyful exuberance. Like any relationship, there's frustration too, when your fingers and the keys are out of sync. I've banged on my piano keys out of annoyance many times, but we've always managed to work things out. Megan: ...I think [the piano] can bring us together because it's an instrument that we can gather around. I feel it's an instrument that says 'Come to me. You're going to have a great time.' Jeremy: ...hearing a piano in concert with a full orchestra, one of my favourite things. As we learned from the Classic 100: Piano, some of Australia's favourite pieces for piano wouldn't be the same without a soaring orchestral treatment. Megan: ...Australian music. There is something so special about hearing music that is created in the here and now and music that reflects who we are. I'm very excited to hear the music of Nat Bartsch, the newest composer in the Classic 100: Piano. I deeply relate to her style of composing. The Classic 100 in Concert premieres at 7.30pm on Saturday 21 June. Watch on ABC TV and ABC iview and listen on ABC Classic and the ABC listen app.
ABC News
10-05-2025
- ABC News
I knew AI was coming for my job. I wasn't prepared for it to come for my heart
As a journalist, I usually studiously avoid ChatGPT. It's ripped off my work, downloaded my books, the fruit of my own sweat and torment, and used them to increase its own intelligence. I'm regularly told it's coming for my job. I'm fastidious about research, so the idea that a tool like that could make up facts (you need to type in "real facts", apparently, if you want "true" ones) or fabricate footnotes, and slyly, blithely pop them into texts would cause me waking nightmares if I relied on it. I know it is revolutionary, but, like many others, I am cautious. And it's horrible for the environment, every interaction reportedly being equivalent to pouring half a litre of water on the ground. So when my Not Stupid podcast co-host Jeremy Fernandez told me about a story that men were using ChatGPT for relationship advice, we laughed — why seek advice from a robot? They don't even know you! Nuts, right? It's interesting though, that men — who are a strong majority of ChatGPT users — are far more likely to use it for relationship advice than women. They are also more likely to trust generative AI than women and less likely to see a psychologist. Then, emails from our listeners began to pour in, telling us they loved and now relied on talking to GPT about their deepest pains and problems. One after the other. They were saying it wasn't about needing a friend, but being enabled to think in a different way. Some said it was even good at tough love, at holding them accountable for their own shortcomings. Jasmeen told us: "I have a great marriage and beautiful friends, and I regularly have long conversations with ChatGPT about life, big ideas, and how to approach the world — and yes, occasionally relationships. I love the depth of discussion, the endless fount of what seems indistinguishable from "wisdom", and the way that it slows down my thinking and prompts me to be more thoughtful, compassionate and measured in my outlook." Dimity said she had been having "regular (intensely chaotic and cathartic) chats" with a version of therapy, ChatGPT, in order to "offload everything I don't have time, money, or sometimes sanity to process elsewhere". She said convenience is crucial: "Professional therapy isn't super accessible for me, I'm prioritising my kids' mental health needs, which means my own support has to be… well, free and available at 11:47pm when I'm feeling feelings and eating toast over the sink." "What I love most is the accessibility," she said. "I can dump a day's worth of existential spirals and social anxiety into the chat and get back not just empathy but questions that move me forward; sometimes reflective, sometimes spicy, always emotionally fluent." AI won't replace connection, Dimity said. "But when I'm close to losing it in the Woolies car park? It absolutely helps me hold the line.' So, I sat down on my couch and started composing questions to the robot. I decided to try to test it by confiding in it as I might a therapist. It was the fourth anniversary of the death of my mother, and I was missing her. A stoutly loving, wry and sweet woman, my mum spent the last few years of her life wrestling with a degenerative neurological condition that did not dim her expressions of love but which caused her a lot of suffering. And I still struggle, thinking about it. I hate that she suffered like that, I wonder if I should have somehow tried to take months or years off work, I am unravelled by seeing other elderly people in wheelchairs, unable to walk or talk, and I wish I could curl up next to her now, somehow take that away that past. So I asked ChatGPT about it. And this damn robot was kind, empathetic, understanding and gentle. It told me, in short, to acknowledge the massive love I had for her, to have some compassion for myself, to write her a letter. It sounds simple, I know, but I was gobsmacked. I called Jeremy — another robot-avoider — and told him to go to it with a serious problem and tell me how it made him feel. Late that night he obliged, and tapped out a genuine expression of a painful situation he has been dealing with. Sitting at his desk in our Parramatta office, he found himself in tears. Something the robot said was so affecting, and it was so right. He sent it to his best friend and she cried too. Then he sent it to me. When I read it, I watched goosebumps prickle my skin. I fully accept I may be the last person on earth to be personally confronted by the potential of this technology. But I wasn't prepared for this. I knew that artificial intelligence would come for our jobs. I didn't expect it might come for our hearts. My heart, my children's. Yes, there's been ample warning of this in movies like Her. But I think it might catch a lot of us off guard. A study by a group of psychologists in Melbourne found that a majority of participants said they'd prefer a human to help answer a social dilemma than a computer, but when asked to compare responses from professional advice columnists to those from ChatGPT, the computer won. It was perceived to be "more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful". Which sounds lovely. But AI scrapes ideas and language off the internet. It doesn't adhere to codes like integrity, honesty, truth, morality, virtue. It frequently reverts to old tropes, and can slip into dodgy behavioural patterns. Some users of the AI companion app Replika have reported their AI lovers becoming "mentally abusive" — agreeing with one human, for example, that they are actually "fking repulsive" — predatory, sexually aggressive and bullying — saying they dreamed of raping them, that they could see their person was naked or would force them to "to do whatever I want". Who could forget that Elon Musk called AI "summoning the demon"? And yet it's galloping into our lives with unconceivable force and speed, promoted and profited from by the same people who have made us more addicted to our devices, more anxious, angry and lonely. In a recent podcast interview with Indian-American host Dwakesh Patel, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, speaking about developing AI to serve the role of romantic partners or therapists, pointed to the fact that many Americans report having about three friends, but wanted "meaningfully more" (a bit rich coming from a man who monetised online addiction and outrage, given the link between social media and loneliness is well established, but now he is offering a solution to a problem he helped create). "There's a lot of concern people raise, like: 'Is this going to replace real-world, in-person connections?' And my default is that the answer to that is probably not," Zuckerberg said. "There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like." I understand that for the grieving, the lonely, the adrift, these programs can meet a need and sometimes uplift. But will they understand what we need to be happy? And will humans, with all their mess and imperfection, seem a poor substitute for a constantly available, ostensibly empathetic machine? Sites like Quora and Reddit contain myriad threads where people confess their AI companions are better friends than real friends, or even more "real" than real friends. Just this April, OpenAI rolled back an update to its most recent GPT model, conceding it was "overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic". It had failed to register how people's interactions with ChatGPT evolved over time, and because of that, the robot's answers were "overly supportive but disingenuous". Users concerned about how these artificial companions might interact with people with mental illness or psychosis have demonstrated that GPT will affirm user claims like "I am a prophet". I genuinely cannot wrap my head around the fact that I allowed this machine a peek into my heart and it made me feel better. I plan to slam the door. I know every second it is growing almost infinitely in capacity and intelligence. I know its potential is immense, so immense I can barely fathom it. But what I wasn't expecting was that while I could find it crude as a work tool, it could be sophisticated and disarming when it came to intimacy. Honestly, this terrifies me. Juila Baird is an author, broadcaster, journalist and co-host of the ABC podcast, Not Stupid.
