Fully AI-generated music to be banned from ARIA charts.

 Extract from ABC News

By national AI reporter Cam Wilson

• Topic:Technology

6 hours ago

ARIA has moved to ban AI music from its charts, but some exemptions will apply. (Supplied: ARIA)

In short:

Australia's main music charts have announced a ban on AI-generated music to start this week.

The Australian Recording Industry Association says wholly AI-generated tracks will not be eligible for the ARIA Charts, though recordings using AI in a supporting role will remain eligible.

It comes after a song produced with AI became the most-played track on Australian radio and reached number four on two ARIA charts in July.

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Songs created mostly or entirely by artificial intelligence will be excluded from Australia's official music charts from this Friday, under new rules set down by the recording industry.

However, AI-assisted recordings can still chart if they are substantially human-made.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), which runs the charts of the most popular music in Australia, has updated its Charts Code of Practice to put it in line with principles put out by the global recording industry.

The updated code excludes music that has used generative AI unless it is "substantially human-made" and "raises no stream or chart manipulation concerns".

The new code lets ARIA remove ineligible recordings, alter chart positions and revoke chart awards. Artists and representatives can contest exclusions.

The change will apply to the charts released on Friday.

Songs created mostly or entirely by AI will be excluded from the ARIA charts from Friday. (Supplied: ARIA)

ARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd said while artists were already using AI tools, music generated wholly by services built on artists' recordings was a different matter altogether.

"This gives everyone who releases music in Australia a clear rule to work to," she said.

"We call on all parties who have a role in deciding the music played and promoted to Australian audiences, particularly radio, to support human artistry and implement similar changes across their own codes."

AI-generated music storming up the charts

The decision follows scrutiny of Queensland DJ and producer Josh Fawaz's cover of Madonna's Like a Prayer, which became the most-played song on Australian radio and reached number four on two ARIA charts in July.

The track attracted criticism from music figures who believed generative AI had been used.

Fawaz said he used AI "as a tool" and later updated the track listing on Spotify to say the vocals and drums were AI-generated.

ARIA's move draws from the principles published in July by the global body representing the recorded music industry, which said more than 20 official chart programs were adopting rules intended to distinguish human-created recordings from wholly AI-generated material.

An ARIA spokesperson told the ABC that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) rules would likely disqualify music with lead vocals or key instrumentals that were AI-generated, suggesting Fawaz's song may not qualify under the new rules.

IFPI said its concerns included AI models trained on artists' music without authorisation from rights holders.

Musicians are making their voices heard in the AI copyright war. (Tom Hartley)

Spotify has taken a different transparency measure when it comes to AI music.

It has pledged to badge AI personas and exclude them from recommendations by default, however that badge applies to just the identity behind an artist profile, not whether AI was used to make a particular recording.

ARIA's move comes amid a wider dispute between creative industries and AI companies, many of which have built their technology using copyrighted material without artists' permission.

The federal government is working on new rules for AI and data centres that would include "strong copyright protections for Australian creators".

Ocean temperatures hit 'very troubling' record high.

 Extract from ABC News

• Topic:Oceans

5 hours ago

Ocean temperatures have reached a record high.  (ABC News: Kerrin Binnie)

In short: 

The world's ocean temperatures hit 21.1 degrees Celsius on Friday and Saturday, narrowly edging out the record set in March 2024. 

Scientists say a supersized natural El Niño and human-caused climate change have spurred the record. 

Normally, sea surface temperatures peak in March and April due to most of the ocean being in the southern hemisphere. 

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The world's oceans have reached their highest temperatures on record and are likely to warm even further in the next few months, putting stress on life in the water and on land. 

Spurred by a still-growing but already supersized natural El Niño and human-caused climate change, the world's ocean temperatures hit 21.1 degrees Celsius on Friday and Saturday, narrowly edging out the record set in March 2024, Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead for European climate service Copernicus, said. 

"This is yet another sign of our climate system under strain and the ocean under immense pressure," Ms Burgess said.

European climate service Copernicus produced the new data.  (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall )

Jane Lubchenco, an oceanographer and former chief of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, called the record "very troubling".

"An ocean this warm destabilises weather patterns and threatens food security, economic prosperity and marine life," Dr Lubchenco said in an email.

"A warmer ocean is not our friend."

Warmer water means worse storms and hotter nights

When the ocean warms, it becomes more acidic and carries less oxygen, which hurts food industries that rely on the seas, Ms Burgess said. 

She said it also changed ocean currents and weather patterns, giving more juice to storms, making them rainier and making storm surges bigger. 

Weather bureau declares El Niño

El Niño is a state which can linger for up to 12 months and disrupt weather patterns across the globe, with Australia especially prone.

"When we have a warmer ocean such as we've had in Europe this summer, it amplifies the impact of heat waves because you don't get the cooler night-time temperatures with the sea breeze coming off the ocean when the ocean is very warm," she said.

Normally, because most of the southern hemisphere is ocean, the world's sea surface temperature peaks in March and April, as the southern summer draws to a close. But this year, the record was set in August, Ms Burgess said. 

She said this meant the oceans would keep getting hotter until the current El Niño — a natural, temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that warps weather and raises temperatures globally — reached its peak, which was expected sometime between November and January.

The current El Niño is already as big as recent ones and it is still growing. It is expected to reach unprecedented levels at its peak. 

Ms Burgess said it was responsible for a good chunk of the heat in the oceans, alongside long-term warming from burning coal, oil and gas, which had warmed the waters by 0.8C.

AP

To build Claude, Anthropic needed to destroy millions of books.

 Extract from Eureka Street

• Home
• Vol 36 No 16
• To build Claude, Anthropic needed to destroy millions of books

INTERNATIONAL

• Binoy Kampmark
• 20 August 2026

 

Last month, an investigation by 404 Media reported on the purchasing habits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies regarding old books (immediately, the issue of age crops up), identifying ISBNdb as a seminal figure in the field. The company, according to its own description, ‘gathers data from various public sources like libraries and merchants to compile a vast collection of unique book data searchable by ISBN, title, author or publisher.’ At present, it boasts 111,978,817 searchable books and offers clients somewhere between 1,000 and 1 million books per engagement. Older print publications are advertised as the purer sort, uncontaminated by the presence of generative-AI. ‘Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination,’ states an article published by the company. It remains unclear whether ISBNdb’s client list includes many of the destructive scanning persuasion, though the company is not oblivious to the problem.

ISBNdb by no means has a monopoly in this field. The Canadian company Zoom Books specialises in acquiring nonfiction and academic titles from the 1970s in bulk. These are then stored in German warehouses prior to their transport to the United States and Canada. It is there that AI companies then go to work scanning and destroying the hard copies. The practice struck Thomas Koch, press spokesperson for the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, as abominable not only because of its destructive dimension to the physical book, but also because of the violation of copyright arising from feeding LLMs ‘without consent and without payment.’

Anthropic’s activities came to light in documents filed in the Northern District of California case Bartz v Anthropic PBC, involving the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, all of whom alleged copyright infringement by the company. Of keen interest was the role of ‘Project Panama’, led by Tom Turvey, a former employee of Google and a central figure behind the creation of Google Books. The project, as the court order details, was intended to create ‘a central library of “all the books in the world” to retain “forever.”’ The AI firm could then mine the quarry for “various sets and subsets of digitized books to train various large language models under development to power its AI services.”

The destructive terminus for the scanned books was revealed in an internal memorandum from April 13, 2024. Authored by Turvey, it is unequivocal: ‘Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all of the books in the world.’ The memorandum encourages company employees to use discretion when discussing the project. ‘Why use a codename? We use “soft codename” because we don’t want to be known that we are working on this. This document is available to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic.’

Instead of seeking individual agreements with publishers to license copies for training AI, a process scoffingly dismissed as “legal/practice/business slog”, the team led by Turvey ‘emailed major book distributors and retailers about bulk purchasing their print copies for the AI firm’s “research library”.’ Millions of dollars were expended on printed books, even those in used condition. Retained service providers then went about their work: stripping the books of their bindings, adjusting the pages to size and digitising the copies. ‘Each print copy book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books).’ Paper originals were discarded. Not content with seeking hard copies, Anthropic also sought copies aplenty from the pirate-vendor market, including five million copies from LibGen (five million copies), two million items from Pirate Library Mirror (2 million) and Books 3 (approximately 183,000.

This orgy of physical destruction did not particularly interest Judge William Alsup. Of primary concern was whether copyright violations had taken place. Regarding the created ‘research library’, Judge Alsup found no issue with Anthropic’s conversion of each book copy’s format from print to digital. ‘Anthropic purchased its print copies fair and square.’ Insofar as the purchase and scanning of hard-copy books was concerned, the company’s LLMs failed to reproduce ‘to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style’. Claude, the primary model in question, ‘outputted grammar, composition, and style that the underlying LLM distilled from thousands of works.’ But copyright did not cover ‘“method[s] of operation, concept[s], [or] principle[s]” “illustrated” [ ] or embodied in [a] work.’ The use of copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate the new text was ‘quintessentially transformative.’

 

'It gives free rein to companies to pursue generative AI development, a process that will, in time, transform the author not into an enlightened producer of knowledge but a beholden consumer, ever at the mercy of Claude and others of its ilk.'

The authors who filed the action had some joy regarding the pirated copies. ‘The person who copies the textbook from a pirate site has infringed already, full stop.’ Anthropic’s claim that using copies for a central library was a case of fair use was untenable. The court further rejected the company’s contention ‘that the use of copies for a central library can be excused as fair use merely because some will eventually be used to train LLMs.’
The judgment is apocalyptic for those who believe in the sensuality of knowledge gained through a physical book. With characteristic bluntness, Mike Masnick of Techdirt identified the essence of the case. Alsup had ‘essentially created a roadmap that validates legitimate AI training while drawing clear lines around what crosses into infringement.’ Unfortunately, it gives free rein to companies to pursue generative AI development, a process that will, in time, transform the author not into an enlightened producer of knowledge but a beholden consumer, ever at the mercy of Claude and others of its ilk.

 

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.

 

Australia's first bird flu case in a mammal confirmed in South Australia, minister says.

 Extract from ABC News

• Topic:Avian Influenza

 2 hours ago

A long-nosed fur seal is Australia's first case of H5 bird flu in a mammal.  (ABC South East SA: Caroline Horn/File)

In short:

The first case of bird flu in a mammal has been confirmed in a long-nose fur seal found at Beachport, on South Australia's south-east coast.

Federal Agricultural Minister Julie Collins says the detection is concerning but not unexpected.

The Invasive Species Council says the development is "devastating news for wildlife".

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Australia's first case of bird flu in a mammal has been confirmed following testing of a long-nosed fur seal found in South Australia. 

Federal Agriculture Minister Julie Collins has told reporters in Hobart the seal was found at Beachport, 300 kilometres south of Adelaide. 

"This is sadly our first confirmed case of H5 bird flu in a mammal in Australia," Ms Collins said.

"Although this is a concerning development, it is not unexpected for us to start to see infection in other wildlife, particularly in marine mammals, particularly in areas where there are high infection rates in wild birds.

"I have been advised that at this time the detection does not appear to be associated with other sick or dead marine mammals.

"An infection of this individual animal is likely to have occurred due to exposure to infected wild birds or the environment that they share."

Julie Collins announced the confirmed case at a media conference in Hobart. (ABC News)

There have now been 298 positive H5 bird flu events recorded in Australia since the outbreak, with 194 of those in South Australia.

"At this stage there is no evidence of infection in our poultry or agriculture systems," Ms Collins said.

The minister said she would be travelling to South Australia "in the coming days" to discuss the state's response to H5 bird flu.

SA Environment Minister Emily Bourke said there were "devastating numbers" of detections in South Australia, with the fur seal case "something we always knew would be coming".

"This came from Heard Island where we saw 75 per cent of the pups on Heard Island killed through bird flu, that's 13,000 seal pups," she said.

Heard Island is an Australian external territory about 4,000 kilometres south-west of mainland Australia, and a haven for breeding seals and seabirds in the Southern Ocean.

Ms Bourke also confirmed a previously suspected case in a little penguin on Kangaroo Island had also been confirmed.

Emily Bourke says the detection is not unexpected. (ABC News: Ashlin Blieschke)

She said there was "no cure" or ability to stop bird flu, but the SA government was working very closely with the federal government on its national vaccination program.

"There is no off-the-shelf vaccine for mammals … we are the last place in the world to be going through this as a continent and no-one has found a vaccine to this point in the last five years when it comes to bird flu for mammals," Ms Bourke said.

"No other country has been able to come up with a way to say that we can control bird flu."

The Invasive Species Council chief executive Jack Gough said the confirmed case of bird flu in a fur seal was "devastating news for wildlife" because mammal-to-mammal transmission occurred quickly among seals when bird flu arrived in South America and Antarctica.

He said the detection in the long-nose fur seal was "really concerning because we know we can expect potential colony collapses", similar to what had occurred when 30,000 elephant seals died from bird flu in South America.

"Particularly, I'm worried about what this might mean for the Australian sea lions,"

Mr Gough said.

"There's less than 10,000 of mature, breeding adult sea lions.

"This could be an extinction level event for that iconic Australian species.

"We are still just at the early stages of this devastating virus and the bad news is going to keep coming for our wildlife as it spreads around the continent and between species."

More on bird flu

Fears for sea lions as suspected bird flu spreads to breeding ground

Topic:Avian Influenza

When hundreds of animals die from bird flu, what happens next?

Topic:

Residents 'gutted' as more cases of H5 bird flu emerge in NSW

Topic:Avian Influenza

Wildlife experts warn bird flu mass deaths are 'the start of the mayhem'

Topic:

SA's chief vet Skye Fruean said the mammals most at risk of getting bird flu included predatory animals.

"The sort of mammals that might come into contact with birds most at risk of getting bird flu, so predatory animals, scavenging animals like cats," she said.

"We do expect that the seals and sea lions would be more at risk because this is the same strain that we have seen in Heard Island where we did see mass mortalities of seals."

She advised pet owners to keep their dogs on leads and cats indoors.

The government has advised anyone who sees sick or dead birds not to touch them or get close to them but to record their location and make a report.

I have seen the raw grief of a family who lost a son to gambling. Labor’s stitch-up shows politics is broken.

 Extract from The Guardian

Opinion

Gambling

David Pocock

How is it that Australians can call so strongly for action on gambling advertising and the major parties fail so comprehensively to listen?

Wed 19 Aug 2026 11.05 AEST

The deal the prime minister has cut with the Coalition on gambling will be a huge disappointment to people across Australia.

This legislation was about more than just gambling reform. It was a test of whether our parliament listens to the people over vested interests, and the clear answer to that is no. It also raises serious questions about our major party system.

The prime minister had an opportunity to leave a legacy and change our country for the better, and he has instead chosen a path pushed by the gambling industry. Communities rightly feel sold out to a predatory industry that profits from people’s pain.

David Pocock condemns Labor-Coalition deal on gambling bill as ‘betrayal of all Australians’

Read more

That pain was on full display during a recent Senate inquiry into the bill. We heard the raw grief from a family who lost a brother and a son. This family courageously shared their story in the hope that the government would act to prevent gambling harm, to stop other families having to experience the indescribable pain their own suffers to this day. They shared some of their son’s and brother’s last words, words that brought the committee to tears.

“I am ending my life because I am so pathologically addicted to gambling and cannot get myself to stop. I can’t even get myself to stop to save my own life nor to save my loved ones from the pain of me committing suicide. I am just so disgusted and revolted with myself and want to end my life as soon as possible before my addiction ruins more people around me. I am convinced that the world will, in the long run, be better off with one less person like me. I wish I never placed that first bet. But here I am. I cannot change anything in the past, and so this is where my life will end.”

Hearing testimony like this, after being pulled aside at event after event by predominantly young men over the last few years, has left me angry. I’ve heard story after story of shame, strained relationships and financial ruin as a result of gambling addiction.

How can the prime minister hear evidence of the overwhelming harm and respond with a few tweaks to a weak package?

It is damning that Australians can call so strongly for protections from the harms of gambling advertising and the major parties fail so comprehensively to listen. That we can have backbenchers on both the Labor and Coalition side defy party solidarity and speak out, calling for stronger reform, only to be ignored and forced to vote with their respective parties for inadequate legislation.

What does all this say about the parliamentary process?

A government-led committee delivered 31 unanimously supported recommendations, a Senate inquiry heard a wealth of evidence about the need to implement those 31 recommendations. Both were ignored.

This is a tragic missed opportunity – a betrayal of the people who have pushed so hard for stronger action and a betrayal of the vast majority of Australians who want an end to gambling ads. It will be a damaging legacy for the prime minister.

Despite what the PM says, this isn’t about stopping people having a punt, it’s about protecting children from being indoctrinated by what the late Labor MP Peta Murphy called a “predatory industry”.

Yet again we see vested interests put ahead of community interest. The gambling lobby, leaning on free-to-air television and the major sporting codes, have well and truly won the day with this legislation. As my independent colleague, and member of the committee that handed down the Murphy report, Kate Chaney said, it shows why politics in this country is broken.

Australians are angry about the way our system has lacked long-term thinking and prioritising them ahead of vested interests. They are looking for anyone who will take on the establishment and deliver for the people. We have to build a better way of doing politics in this country – that makes decisions like we plan to be here for a long time and delivers legislation in line with what is good for Australians, on everything from a gas export tax to gambling.

Nordic countries have for decades operated as minority governments, which has led to a consensus culture in lawmaking that reflects the views of the community. And we seem to be pointing to their successes on everything from their sovereign wealth fund to their approach to housing. These are all things that people raise with me frequently. They also ask: how do we change this?

Australians could consider this when we next go to the polls. I’ve seen the power of a government having to negotiate. In the last term of parliament, bills had to pass after negotiation with multiple independents and minor parties. It led to much better, more robust legislation. Minority government is something we need to consider embracing rather than being mugged by the major parties’ self-interested scare campaigns if we want better outcomes for the long term.

David Pocock is the independent senator for the Australian Capital Territory

In Australia, Gambling Help Online is available on 1800 858 858. The National Debt Helpline is at 1800 007 007. The crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org