Notices by camwilson (camwilson@mastodon.social)

I’m told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will sign some agreement in Canberra tomorrow about the AI company will look to build data centres in Australia that will abide with our federal government’s new national data centre expectations

"wow ever since i got claude code i haven't written a single line of code" - guy who has never ever written a line of code

Scoop: the pro-teen social media ban lobby group 36 Months was funded & co-staffed by its co-founder's ad production firm that was simultaneously making gambling ads

The federal government has ignored calls for a gambling ad ban while pursuing the social media ban.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-ban-group-funded-firm-making-gambling-ads/

debating copyright law misses the point that the new paradigm of information distribution is extremely centralised. their size and the amount of information ingested was never imagined when thinking about fair use. we need to new ways to pay for info that's clearly valuable to the AI companies

If you think AI training is the same as someone reading and reciting, that's fine fine. but our legal system wasn't set up for a world in which there's like, what, 5-10? major AI models which become a major market for information because they are the middleman between consumers and info producers

much of the discussion re: AI & copyright has been about whether training is fair use.

that's a legal debate that I'm less interested in than the question about what happens to the sources of information — news, culture etc — if a lot of its value can be extracted by AI without much compensation

everyone talks about ai “assistants” like it’s some whipsmart loyal sidekick, but they’re actually this guy: a scheming, sycophant vizier who whispers delusions in your ear and is actually working for another master

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