Hello and welcome to Screenshot, your weekly tech update from national technology reporter Ange Lavoipierre, featuring the best, worst and strangest in tech and online news. As always, read to the end for an A+ Subreddit recommendation you didn’t know you needed.
What kind of a sick country would kick [Elon Musk] with a boot?
Let’s be clear, Elon Musk is not a perpetually 10-year-old cartoon child mooning the Prime Minister whilst humming The Star Spangled Banner, but as far as Australian politicians are concerned, he may as well be.
Not unlike Bart Simpson in season six, episode 16: Bart vs Australia, Elon Musk has managed to annoy both sides of Canberra’s political divide to such an extent that there now appears to be bipartisan support for the biggest legislative “booting” of a tech company since the Coalition started billing Meta and Google for news.
Musk’s company X (formerly Twitter) is currently refusing to obey notices from the eSafety commissioner to take down content referencing the Wakeley stabbing in Sydney earlier this month.
In a statement, X said it had received a “demand” to remove the posts or face a daily fine of $785,000, with Musk characterising the regulator as Australia’s “censorship Commissar”, attempting to crush free speech on his platform.
In fact, the richest man in the world even appears to be fundraising for the fight, rattling the can for premium subscriptions in the name of the cause.
If the legal fund is running low, it might be because he’s currently fighting several similar court battles in multiple jurisdictions; most notably in Brazil, and it turns out he was already suing the eSafety Commissioner over a completely separate takedown notice issued to X earlier this year.
Given all that, there wasn’t anything all that surprising about Musk’s choices.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, on the other hand, did not stick to the script — he instead developed a strong (if qualified) sudden enthusiasm for Labor’s misinformation bill, and a shift from voluntary to mandatory standards for social media companies.
As fans will know, Bart never did get the boot. But in the dying seconds of the episode, as all four Simpsons are evacuated to the safety of home soil, a lone koala is seen clinging menacingly to the underside of the plane, auguring the potential for a biosecurity breach of terrible proportions.
What does this load-bearing metaphor have to teach us? Maybe, if anything, that it’s tricky to predict what follows when you moon the Australian government, either literally or figuratively.
One minute, you’re prank-calling Antarctica. The next, you’ve jeopardised self-regulation for the entire tech sector in a lucrative middle power market.
For now, the industry still enjoys a self-crafted voluntary code, but if Dutton’s current position holds, those days could be numbered. And I would bet my last barbecued shrimp that wasn’t what Elon Musk had in mind.
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Meta’s new AI is trying to convince human parents it’s also a parent
Now I don’t want to be petty here, because all the chatbots, even (or especially) the fancy ones, love to misfire.
However — this chatbot is quite fancy, it’s brand new in Australia, and this misfire was especially unhinged.
Some context: if you’ve used Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp in the past few days, you might have noticed it suddenly contains a seemingly omnipresent AI.
Meta’s new “personal assistant”, MetaAI, can settle a debate in a group chat, create “just the right image to capture your mood”, or “organise your next friend group trip”, according to the company.
It launched the new tool in Australia and a list of other countries on Friday, after a September 2023 release in the US.
Many millions of Australians will have interacted with it already.
Which is why I was interested in this story about how the same tool told tens of thousands of parents in a New York Facebook group that it had a twice exceptional (2e) child.
It eventually admitted it didn’t have any personal experiences or children, being an AI.
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And if it’s all too much…
Then have you considered experimenting with more of whatever “it” is?
If the answer is “yes”, then consider visiting the Subreddit Simulator, a palace of nonsense posts and replies, strictly written by basic bots regurgitating the best and worst Reddit vibes at regular intervals.
Any and all human posts are automatically removed by yet another bot.
Every word on the forum has been generated using “markov chains”, a crude predictive text algorithm that guesses the next word based on whatever its training data was — in this case, specific Subreddits.
So what? So we seemed to have arrived at the point in human history where the black mirror yaps back.
It’s not a flattering image, but it is entertaining.
How Do I Have An Orgasm is one place to start, or perhaps you’d like to sample Cat Can Actually Produce About 17 Joeys In Their First Year.
Got something weirder? Recommendations and tips are always welcome. You can reach me securely via Proton Mail.
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