Hello and welcome to Screenshot, your weekly tech update from national tech reporter Ange Lavoipierre, featuring the best, worst and weirdest in tech and online news. As always, read until the end for an A+ Subreddit recommendation you didn’t know you needed.
What kind of sick country would kick (Elon Musk) with a boot?
Let’s be clear, Elon Musk is not a perpetual 10-year-old cartoon kid who picks on the Prime Minister while humming The Star Spangled Bannerbut As far as Australian politicians are concerned, it might as well be.
A bit like Bart Simpson in season six, episode 16: Bart vs. AustraliaElon Musk has managed to rile both sides of Canberra’s political divide to such an extent that there now appears to be bipartisan support for the biggest legislative ‘boot’ of a tech company since the Coalition started charging Meta and Google for news.
Musk’s company X (formerly Twitter) currently refuses to obey advice from the Electronic Security Commissioner to remove content referring to the Wakeley stabbing in Sydney earlier this month.
In a statement, of expression on its platform.
Actually, the richest man in the world even appears to be raising money for the fightlobbying for premium subscriptions in the name of the cause.
If the legal fund is running out, it may be because it is currently fighting against several similar legal battles in several jurisdictions; especially in Braziland it turns out he was already suing the Electronic Security Commissioner for a Completely separate takedown notice issued to X earlier this year.
Given all of this, Musk’s choices weren’t terribly surprising.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, by contrast, did not stick to the script: instead he developed a suddenly strong (if nuanced) enthusiasm for Labor’s disinformation bill and the move from voluntary standards to mandatory standards for social media companies.
As fans know, Bart never got the start. But in the final seconds of the episode, as the four Simpsons are evacuated to the safety of their home soil, a lone koala is seen clinging menacingly to the underside of the plane, auguring the potential for a breach biosecurity of terrible proportions.
What does this powerful metaphor teach us? Perhaps it is rather difficult to predict what will come next when attacking the Australian government, both literally and figuratively.
One minute you’re making a joke about Antarctica. Then you jeopardized the self-regulation of the entire technology sector in a lucrative middle-power market.
For now, the industry still benefits from a voluntary code of its own making, but if Dutton’s current stance is maintained, those days could be numbered. And I’ll bet my latest grilled shrimp wasn’t what Elon Musk had in mind.
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Meta’s new AI tries to convince human parents that she’s a parent too
Now, I don’t want to be petty here, because all chatbots, even (or especially) the most sophisticated ones, love to mess up.
However, this chatbot is quite sophisticated, it’s brand new to Australia, and this dud was particularly unbalanced.
A little context: If you’ve used Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp in recent days, you may have noticed that they suddenly contain seemingly ubiquitous 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 “plan your next group trip with friends”, according to the company.
He launched the new tool in Australia and a list of other countries on Fridayafter a release in September 2023 in the United States.
Several million Australians will have already interacted with it.
That’s 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 child (2nd).
He eventually admitted that he had no personal experiences or children, being an AI.
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And if it’s too much…
So have you considered experimenting more with what “it” is?
If the answer is “yes,” consider visiting the Subreddit Simulatora palace of nonsensical posts and replies, strictly written by basic bots regurgitating Reddit’s best and worst vibes at regular intervals.
All human posts are automatically deleted by another robot.
Each word in the forum was generated using “Markov chains,” a raw predictive text algorithm that guesses the next word based on its training data – in this case, specific subreddits.
So what? So we seem to have arrived at the point in human history where the black mirror responds.
It’s not a flattering image, but it’s entertaining.
How can I have an orgasm is a starting point, or perhaps you would like to taste A cat can actually produce around 17 Joeys in its first year.
Do you have anything weirder? Recommendations and advice are always welcome. You can contact me securely via Proton Mail.
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