Hello and welcome to Screenshot, your weekly tech update from national tech journalist Ange Lavoipierre, featuring the best, worst and weirdest in tech and online news. Read until the end for a chance to listen to the whales.
Australians trust AI in the news less than the rest of the world
Apparently we are skeptical when it comes to AI.
According to a global survey conducted by the Reuters InstituteAustralians are on average less comfortable with AI-generated insights than the rest of the world.
Compared to the average of 45 percent across the 26 countries surveyed, 59 percent of Australian respondents were very or somewhat uncomfortable with news being primarily produced by AI.
In fact, the only country that was less trusting than us was the UK.
Interestingly, 56% of Australians also said they knew little or nothing about AI – which is about the global average – and people who knew less were also less likely to know about it. trust.
This is not the first time we have been more skeptical than most when it comes to AI and new technologies in general, according to one of the report’s local researchers.
“There is still a lag in how Australians adopt new technologies,” said Professor Sora Park, from the University of Canberra.
“Even this year, every other country has abandoned their use of Facebook for news,” she said, while Australians’ use of Facebook is still relatively stable.
“This is likely to decline in the coming years,” Professor Park predicted, with more people choosing TikTok as their social media platform for news consumption – a trend already evident in other Western markets .
“It’s these things that make me think Australians are a little slow to adopt new technology.”
First Tobacco, Now Social Media: Are Warning Labels for Teens a Moral Test?
You’d be wrong if you thought the recent crescendo of tech anxiety was limited to Australia.
In a opinion article in the New York TimesU.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls for warning labels on social media.
This is a controversial position in some respects because, strictly speaking, the the jury is still not elected regarding the effect of social media on adolescent mental health.
Research shows a clear correlation between poor mental health and social media use, but it is unclear whether social media is the cause, due to a lack of specific long-term data.
Dr. Murthy acknowledges this research gap, but argues that we cannot afford to wait.
“One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school is that in an emergency, you do not have the luxury of waiting for perfect information,” he wrote this week.
This is not the first time he has issued a warning on social media, after calling for stricter regulations in a Notice 2023but the tone this time is more urgent.
“The moral test of any society is how well it protects its children,” he writes.
“The time has come to muster the will to act. The well-being of our children depends on it.”
So far, the official advice in Australia is a little softer than that. A long-awaited report from National Mental Health Commission published last month calls for more research and continued engagement with the sector to ensure “security by design”.
In contrast, politics on this issue have taken a more strident turn, with the Coalition promising to ban social networks to under 16s if he is elected. Labor is slightly more circumspect on the subject, although the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: ‘A ban, if it can be effective, is a good way forward’.
Meta suspends EU AI projects, amid anxiety from users and regulators
You may have noticed recently that your Instagram and Facebook feed has some variations of the following:
“I own the copyright to all images and posts submitted to my Instagram profile and therefore do NOT authorize Meta or other companies to use them to train generative AI platforms. This includes all FUTURE and PAST posts/stories on my profile.”
In case it’s not obvious, a post like this won’t do any good to prevent the parent company Meta training of its AI on your activity on social networks — including posts, photos, captions and comments — as of June 26, due to a change in their terms and conditions.
Australians cannot opt out, but users in the EU and UK could theoretically do so, due to their stricter regulations.
Now they won’t have to, with Meta accepts a request from regulators to suspend the change. The company has also decided to suspend the launch of Meta AI in Europe, believing that without local training data it would be a “second rate” product.
No such break has been announced for Australia, although it should be considered that what Meta is proposing is not that different from the status quo.
For example, X, formerly Twitter, already trains its AI model on user tweets. We know that ChatGPT and Google’s AI ate at least some of our social media posts because they sometimes vomit them out in their answers.
The increased anxiety around Instagram and Facebook may be because they have always been more personal platforms – places where people post family photos, obituaries for loved ones, and photos wedding – so of course users feel strongly about it.
Places like X, on the other hand, have always had a more public dimension – we don’t call it the public square of the Internet for nothing.
Whatever its actual significance, Meta’s impending policy change perhaps acts as an indirect concern for widespread anxiety, triggered by a widespread awareness that our data is far more exposed than we would like, and this since a long time. .
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AI discovered the alphabet of whales
Researchers have successfully used AI to decode the “phonetic alphabet” of sperm whales, challenging the assumption that complex communication is a uniquely human trait.
Scientists have recorded thousands of cases of whale codas, which we hear as clicking sounds, coming from a clan of sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean.
With the help of AI (a technology I’ve heard of is quite good at pattern recognition), they were able to map the sounds and determine that whales have some pretty complicated conversations.
They found that the tempo, pitch, rhythm, and “ornamentation” of sounds, as well as how they were combined, varied significantly depending on the context of the conversation.
For the avoidance of doubt, this does not mean we can talk about whales.
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These whales could be reciting Shakespeare, formulating a new policy on submarines, or chattering about the currents – we’re still waiting for the AI that can give us a real translation.
In the meantime, we know they’re out there chatting.
And if it’s too much…
Know then that less sophisticated forms of communication are always available to you.
Stapling bread to trees may be less decipherable than whale codas, but r/BreadStapledToTrees it’s more than a language, it’s a way of life.
If you would like to staple (add) bread (tips) to your own tree (email), you can contact me securely via Proton Mail.
