Notices by camwilson (camwilson@mastodon.social)

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024 — a rise they attribute to AI crawlers.

AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege

just so you know, australians are calling mastodon "masty" in the most nasal way you can imagine and there's nothing you can do about it

why are Australian politicians weighing in on the motives of an attack that's being investigated by police? it's not undermining the seriousness of something to wait to gather evidence about it. Seems extremely likely it will be linked to antisemitism but, given current tensions, why not make sure?

Teen social media ban bill to become law after Senate passes it in late night session https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-28/social-media-age-ban-passes-parliament/104647138

with we wait for the Senate to vote on the teen social media ban bill, I'm doing a call-out:

which social media accounts, communities and experiences were important to you as a teen and why? Feel free to reply, send me a message or email with as much detail (the nicher the better ha!)

No matter which poll you choose, the Albanese government's teen social media ban is very popular. Here's a few people explaining why they like the idea of the ban despite some of the concerns raised,

https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/11/27/why-teen-social-media-ban-popular/

the report from the inquiry into the teen social media ban bill is out — it recommends passing the bill if 8 other recommendations are followed https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/SocialMediaMinimumAge/Report

Call-out: are you someone who likes the idea of a teen social media ban? I would love to talk to you! my email/msg details are on my website www.cameronwilson.com.au

something that's come up a few times -- I've had people say it's inevitable that people will use a VPN to get around any domestic social media ban. In my experience, it's not that easy, at least when it comes to one big tech player

Beyond questions about how a teen social media ban would work, there's been almost no attention paid to complete lack of evidence for its benefits.

Why is no one asking the Prime Minister for proof that a ban would help even if implemented perfectly?

https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/11/15/anthony-albanese-social-media-ban/

Smart judge:

A Victorian Supreme Court judgehe suspected an applicant had used ChatGPT to write court submissions because they cited non-existant papers.

The judge didn't repeat the fake case names in the judgement "lest they contribute to the problem of LLM AI inventing case citations"

As part of a test run for Australia's corporate regulator, AI was used to summarise submissions made by the public.

The trial found that AI performed worse in every metric compared with humans. Assessors suggested AI would make more work for people, not less. https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/03/ai-worse-summarising-information-humans-government-trial/

no one will remember:

- how much money you made
- how many hours you worked
- how "busy you were"

they will remember:

- nothing
- the internet has destroyed my short term memory
- why did i unlock my phone again? i wanted to do something

NEW: Adobe is selling AI-generated images of war in Israel-Palestine, and they're already spreading across the internet without any indication that they're fake https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/11/01/israel-gaza-adobe-artificial-intelligence-images-fake/