Latest news with #QuarterlyEssay
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Turning sewage into ‘blue gold'; rejecting the manosphere; and a chat with Orwell's son
Good morning, and happy Saturday. Fair bit going on, no? Put it on my tombstone. Here are some thought-provoking reads from around the Guardian this week, some of which you may have missed in the general torrent of news. Settle in for a read – and tell us what you think at This week, Israel's prime minister ordered the bombing of Gaza during Ramadan, killing hundreds of Palestinians and ending a shaky two-month ceasefire. It was, writes Aluf Benn – editor-in-chief of Israel's left-leaning newspaper, Haaretz – devastating but not unexpected, amid the country's 'slide to autocracy'. The goal: 'Netanyahu wants to fight Hamas all the way to ethnic cleansing and is willing to sacrifice the hostages along the way. And he wants to purge the country's establishment of his traditional rivals … keeping the right wing in power for ever.' The Trump effect: Benn describes the US president's recent proposal to relocate the population of Gaza and redevelop the rubble 'almost as divine intervention to the Israeli far right'. 'What was traditionally viewed as an extremist, marginalised idea has now become US policy.' Watching on: Benn suggests the coming weeks will reveal 'if Israel is edging closer to the abyss of war criminality in depopulated Gaza and de facto dictatorship in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, or whether the Netanyahu stampede can be slowed down.' How long will it take to read: three minutes. Jess Hill's new Quarterly Essay asks what on earth we can do about gendered violence. In this very sobering extract, the investigative journalist and educator looks at the escalating culture of misogyny in classrooms. Why classrooms? 'In the commonly used violence prevention metaphor, the 'river of prevention', schools are perhaps the most prized piece of 'dry land',' Hill explains. 'A captive audience, young minds at their most malleable – this is where violence can be stopped before it starts.' She tempers this hopeful vision quite quickly – 'the real world, unfortunately, is a bummer'. But it's not all bad news: teachers say the latest generation of boys and young men are 'already way more switched on'. How long will it take to read: five minutes. Further viewing: I really want/also can't bear to watch new Netflix series Adolescence, a show about teenage knife crime that becomes 'a poignant study of the nightmarish influence of the so-called manosphere' – and described by one critic as powerful enough TV to save lives. French writer and philosopher Didier Eribon's mother was 'a bâtarde, an unloved, illegitimate child, abandoned by her mother'. By 14, she was cleaning middle-class houses; later, she moved from cleaning lady to factory worker. She was 'the victim of a violent and unjust social order', who 'had always felt herself the subject of scorn', he writes. 'How, then, is it possible that she would allow herself to express at every possible moment her hatred of other stigmatised people?' 'Even when my mother was trying to convince me that she was not racist, she was being racist.' – Didier Eribon Over many years and hundreds of conversations, her 'obsessive racism' became the 'background noise' of their relationship – but as she grew older, it reared its head in ways he could no longer ignore. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion This arresting excerpt from Eribon's new book goes beyond one fractured relationship, or even several. Through his mother's calcifying beliefs, Eribon traces a generation's collapse of 'class consciousness' and worker solidarity – and a growing, ambient hatred of all things 'left'. How long will it take to read: 11 minutes. Nine months after three-week-old Richard Blair was adopted, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died suddenly, leaving him with his new father, Eric – AKA George Orwell. Sitting down with Simon Hattenstone, Blair reflects on the devotion, and many paradoxes, of the man who shaped his life: writer, womaniser, and tea tyrant. How long will it take to read: 10 minutes. Further reading: Blair is … not so hot on Australian Anna Funder's recent and very celebrated literary take on his family, which suggests Orwell 'wrote his wife out of his story' – but read what she had to say about the project. In the 1960s, Switzerland had some of the dirtiest water in Europe. As Phoebe Weston writes, it was 'blighted by mats of algae, mountains of foam, scum, and dead fish floating on the surface'. You could get sick if you swallowed it (seems understandable), and swimming was banned in some rivers on health grounds. Now, they're some of the cleanest on the continent. How did they fix it? In short, a 'complex network of sewage plants'. Switzerland is now a world leader in filtering micropollutants (for depressing details on those, see the story), using a special treatment system that 'works like your stomach'. This, from a country that once let raw sewage and industrial wastewater flow directly into its water. Your move, Sydney. How long will it take to read: a few minutes. Enjoying the Five Great Reads email? Then you'll love our weekly culture and lifestyle newsletter, Saved for Later. Sign up here to catch up on the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture, trends and tips for the weekend. 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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
