disassociated

United States based book discovery service BookBub recently asked twelve hundred writers about their thoughts on generative AI. Unsurprisingly, opinion was sharply divided, with an almost exactly half of respondents either against the technology, or in favour of it.

Overall, opinions among authors are deeply divided — many consider any use of generative AI unethical and irresponsible, while others find it a helpful tool to enhance their writing and business processes. Some authors remain conflicted, and are still negotiating their own feelings about the utility and morality of this technology.

It seems to me these findings sum up the way people in general, not just authors, see generative AI.

Image courtesy of Ana Šantl.

disassociated has been included in the inaugural edition of the Internet Phone Book, a directory of over seven-hundred personal websites and blogs, compiled by Kristoffer Tjalve, and Elliott Cost.

An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.

You don’t read a great deal of poetry on my website, but Tjalve and Cost offer a definition of poetic in this interview with Meg Miller of Are.na, publishers of the book.

Being a phone directory, each listed website naturally comes with a “phone number”, a three digit code allocated by the authors, a kind of short-cut link, that lets you “call” through, I’m on 492.

As of the time I type, the book has sold out through the publisher’s website (I think another print is in the works), though it is available from selected stockists across Europe, and in South Korea.

Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, and Katerina Gibson, have been named the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025.

Gibson also won the prize in 2023. Meanwhile Adbu’s novel Translations, has been shortlisted in this year’s Stella Prize, while Dunn’s novel Dirt Poor Islanders, was included on the longlist for the 2025 Miles Franklin award, which was announced last week.

The findings come as part of a global study into the use of, and attitudes to artificial intelligence (AI), carried out by multinational professional services network KPMG, in conjunction with Professor Nicole Gillespie and Dr Steve Lockey, of the University of Melbourne.

“The public’s trust of AI technologies and their safe and secure use is central to acceptance and adoption,” Professor Gillespie says. “Yet our research reveals that 78% of Australians are concerned about a range of negative outcomes from the use of AI systems, and 37% have personally experienced or observed negative outcomes ranging from inaccuracy, misinformation and manipulation, deskilling, and loss of privacy or IP.”

While the benefits of AI use in the workplace are understood, many Australians harbour concerns the technology may result in job losses. These fears are justified to an extent however, and not only in Australia, with some freelance IT and creative professionals reporting declines in work availability, something that they are attributing to the prevalence of AI technology.

Ten novels have been included on the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist, which was published on Thursday 15 May 2025.

• Chinese Postman, by Brian Castro
• The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng
• Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
• Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn
• Compassion, by Julie Janson
• Politica, by Yumna Kassab
• Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu
• Highway 13, by Fiona McFarlane
• The Degenerates, by Raeden Richardson
• Juice, by Tim Winton

Australia’s oldest literary award, the Miles Franklin honours novels “of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases“. The shortlist will be announced next month on Wednesday 25 June, with the winner being named a month later on Thursday 24 July.

Lismore, a city located in northern NSW, Australia, suffered catastrophic flooding in 2017, and again in 2022. During the latter event, flood waters reached unprecedented levels, almost completely submerging some buildings in the process.

Floodlands, trailer, a documentary directed by Melbourne based filmmaker Jordan Giusti (Instagram page), is a up close look at the devastation caused by the flooding, and the impact on the residents of the local community.

Floodlands will premier at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, where it will screen on the evening of Saturday 14 June 2025. The film is also a finalist in the festival’s Documentary Australia Award.

Mark Sullivan, writing for Fast Company:

Google DeepMind research scientist Nikolay Savinov said in a recent interview that AI coding tools will soon support 10 million-token context windows — and eventually, 100 million. With that kind of memory, an AI tool could absorb vast amounts of human instruction and even analyze an entire company’s existing codebase for guidance on how to build and optimize new systems.

When a developer uses an AI technology to produce some code, but has no regard for the quality of the generated code, there you have vibe coding.

It might be bad code of the worst sort, but who cares? Not that particular developer. Future coding tools however will eventually — one day — be so proficient that all the code they create will be top notch. Bad code, and vibe coding, will be a thing of the past.

Or will it? The super-duper code these super-duper AI tools generate will be so good, no one will need to worry about its quality any more. That will be vibe coding, but an entirely different form of vibe coding. If you enjoyed the joke, you can start laughing now.

Serbia based SEO consultant Nenad offers a grim assessment of the industry:

The number of available jobs is dwindling. Companies are tightening their budgets and relying more on AI to handle basic tasks. Why hire a freelancer for graphic design when you can get an AI to whip up something decent in seconds? Decent? Yesterday I tested a new Ai service called Readdy, and I got a landing page in 5 minutes that looks like a $1,000 job (5 years ago).

I’ve been hearing anecdotal reports locally (NSW), in recent months, of freelance design and development professionals taking on gig-economy work, point-to-point driving, and food delivery, to help make ends meet. There’s people saying AI will bring about new work opportunities in time, but it seems like there will be a fair few job losses before that happens.

A long time ago, that is. But the motherf***ing website (hopefully them asterisks slip this post through them filters wherever they may be) is lightweight, responsive, and works.

Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them.

Designed by someone called Barry Smith, the motherf***ing website has been around for over ten years — the Digiday article I linked just then, is dated December 2013. I don’t know how I missed seeing this before.

Needless to say, NSFW on account of strong language.

The birthday effect is a thing it seems. Russell Samora, writing for The Pudding crunches the numbers. It looks like quite a few people expire on their “special day”.

Why is there a birthday effect at all? One popular idea centers on the psychological impact of death postponement versus anniversary reaction: Does the looming birthday cause people to postpone death until after they’ve celebrated their special day, or does the birthday itself somehow trigger mortality?

I’ve never liked birthdays, and now I know why…