Extract from ABC News
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. Read to the end for a chance to eavesdrop on the whales.
Australians are less trusting of AI in news than the rest of the world
Apparently, we're a sceptical bunch when it comes to AI.
According to a global survey conducted by the Reuters Institute, Australians are on average less comfortable with AI-generated news than the rest of the world.
Compared with the average of 45 per cent across 26 surveyed countries, 59 per cent of Australian respondents were very or somewhat uncomfortable about news being mainly produced by AI.
In fact, the only country less trusting than us was the UK.
Interestingly, 56 per cent of Australians also said they knew little to nothing about AI — which is roughly the global average — and people who knew less about AI were also less likely to trust it.
It's not the first time we've shown ourselves to be more sceptical than most when it comes to AI and new tech in general, according to one of the report's local researchers.
"There's always a lag in how Australians adopt new technology, " said Professor Sora Park, from the University of Canberra.
"Even this year, all the other countries have dropped [their] Facebook use for news," she said, whereas Australians' use of Facebook is still relatively stable.
"It probably will decrease in the next few years," Professor Park predicted, with more people choosing TikTok as their social media platform for news consumption — a trend that's already playing out in other western markets.
"Those are the things that make me think [Australian] people are a bit slow to adopt new tech."
First tobacco, now social media — are warning labels for teens a moral test?
You'd be wrong if you thought the recent crescendo in tech anxiety was isolated to Australia.
In an opinion article in The New York Times, US Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy is calling for warning labels on social media.
It's a controversial position in some respects because strictly speaking, the jury is still out when it comes to the effect of social media on teen mental health.
Research does show a clear correlation between poor mental health and social media use, but it's not clear on the evidence that social media is the cause, due to a lack of specific long term data.
Dr Murthy acknowledges this research gap, but makes the case that we can't afford to delay.
"One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don't have the luxury to wait for perfect information," he wrote this week.
It's not the first time he's sounded a warning on social media, having called for stronger regulation in a 2023 advisory, but the tone this time around is more urgent.
"The moral test of any society is how well it protects its children," he wrote.
"Now is the time to summon the will to act. Our children's wellbeing is at stake."
So far, the official advice in Australia is a shade milder than that. A long-awaited report from the National Mental Health Commission released last month calls for more research and continued engagement with the sector to ensure "safety by design".
The politics of this issue on the other hand have taken a more strident turn, with the Coalition promising to ban social media for children under 16 if elected. Labor is slightly more circumspect on the topic, although Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said "a ban, if it can be effective, is a good way to go".
Meta pauses EU AI plans, amid anxiety from users and regulators
You may have noticed your Instagram and Facebook feed speckled of late with some variation of the following:
"I own the copyright to all images and posts submitted to my Instagram profile and therefore DO NOT consent to Meta or other companies using 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 will do nothing to prevent parent company Meta from training its AI on your social media activity — including posts, pictures, captions and comments — as of June 26, due to a change in their terms and conditions.
Australians are unable to opt out, but users in the EU and the UK theoretically could have, because of their tighter regulations.
Now, they won’t have to, with Meta agreeing to a request from regulators to pause the change. The company has also decided to hold off launching Meta AI in Europe, reasoning that without local training data, it would be a "second rate" product.
No such pause has been announced for Australia, although it's worth considering that what Meta is proposing is not so 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 have eaten at least some of our social media posts because they occasionally vomit them up in their answers.
The heightened anxiety around Instagram and Facebook may be because they've always been more personal platforms — places where people post family photos, obituaries for loved ones, and wedding photos — so of course users feel strongly.
Places like X on the other hand have always had a more public feel to them — we don't call it the internet's town square for nothing.
Regardless of its actual significance, Meta's impending policy shift is perhaps acting as a proxy concern for a generalised anxiety, triggered by a widespread awakening to the knowledge that our data is far more exposed than we would like, and it has been for a long time.
AI has discovered the whale alphabet
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 recorded thousands of instances of whale codas, which we hear as clicking noises, from one clan of sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean.
With the help of AI (a technology which I've heard is quite good at pattern recognition), they were able to map the sounds, and determine that whales are having quite complicated conversations.
They found the tempo, pitch, rhythm and "ornamentation" of the sounds, as well as how they were combined, varied significantly depending on the conversational context.
For the avoidance of doubt, this does not mean we can speak whale.
Those whales could be reciting whale Shakespeare, formulating a new policy on submarines, or making small talk about the currents — we're still waiting for the AI that can give us an actual translation.
In the meantime, we do know they're down there having a big old yap.
And if it's all too much…
Then know that less sophisticated forms of communication are still available to you.
Stapling bread to trees is arguably less decipherable than whale codas but on r/BreadStapledToTrees it's more than a language — it's a way of life.
If you'd like to staple (add) bread (tips) to a tree (email) of your own, you can reach me securely via Proton Mail.
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