disassociated

Way back in 1979, a British new wave band called Tubeway Army asked the question: Are ‘Friends’ Electric. Note the band’s use of scare quotes around the word friend. Are they suggesting friends that are electric are not real friends? Listen to the song and see what you think.

Forty-six years later, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, believes the majority of people’s friends will soon be AI chatbots of some sort. These AI ‘friends’ might be okay to talk to, but there wouldn’t be much else you could do with them. For example, you couldn’t really go out to dinner together.

Zuckerberg thinks most Americans only have three friends — I wonder what the average friend count is for Facebook members? — but is pretty sure they would like more. He thinks fifteen is the optimal number. The way then to make-up the shortfall is to generate AI companions.

An AI ‘friend’ might be a bit like an imaginary friend who could think for themselves. The Facebook co-founder goes on to suggest therapists and business agents will also be AI chatbots. I’m not sure if chatbots would be ideal therapists, but as business agents they might work.

Brisbane based Australian artist Julie Fragar has won the 2025 Archibald Prize for her portrait of fellow Brisbane based artist Justene Williams (Instagram link), a work as intriguing as its title, Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene).

Sydney based Jude Rae was named winner of the Wynne Prize, for landscape painting, with her work titled Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal. Gene A’Hern, meanwhile, took out the Sulman Prize for genre or mural painting, with Sky painting.

This year’s prizes saw more work by women being selected as finalists, than men, for the first time. If you’re in Sydney between today and Sunday 17 August 2025, the works of the Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman Prize finalists and winners can be seen at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Vortex, by Queensland based Australian author Rodney Hall, has won the fiction prize in The Age Book of the Year award for 2025.

The two times winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, says the basis for his latest novel were some pages for a book he started writing, but later gave up on, in 1971. It pays to hold onto those old manuscripts, even the ones you don’t like, or thought you didn’t.

Lech Blaine, also living in Queensland, won the non-fiction prize, with his memoir Australian Gospel.

The announcement of the winners coincided with the opening of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF), on Thursday. The Age Book of the Year awards have a story worthy of a novel themselves. They were first presented in 1974, by The Age newspaper, for fiction and non-fiction writing. In 1993 a poetry award, the Dinny O’Hearn Prize was added.

In 1998, the awards became a feature of the MWF, until they were ceased all together in 2013. However, in 2021 the award was rebooted, but for fiction only. Then in 2022, an award for non-fiction was introduced (or should that be reintroduced?).

Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica:

A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces.

It’s early days of course, and AI technologies are really still only seeping into workplaces. But the suggestion here is, by taking care of other tasks, AI leaves us free to do other things. Things it presumably can’t yet do.

Yet we’ve been here before, The arrival of successive technologies over recent decades, computers among them, were meant to reduce our workloads, freeing up more time for leisure activities. Here we are though, spending ever more time working, because with new technologies doing more grunt work, we can do more, I don’t know, meaningful workplace tasks.

But Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, sees the picture differently. In an email to staff, he warned AI is “coming for” the jobs of everyone — including his — at the online freelance marketplace:

It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person — Al is coming for you.

Melbourne based sci-fi and speculative fiction author J M Voss was named winner of the 2024 Aurealis Best Science Fiction novel award, on Sunday 4 May 2025, with her novel Temporal Boom. The novel’s premise is intriguing to say the least:

Thirty years ago, the world ended. Not everyone, however, got the memo…

The nation formerly known as Australia struggles on, its red lands stalked by eleven beings of strange and anomalous power. Known as the Portents, their very existence defies all science. A trail of brutal and inexplicable deaths follow those who encounter them.

Quinn Kelly got too close to a Portent once and survived, although not unchanged. When Quinn begins to display an affinity for Time, there are many who would stop at nothing to use her for their own ends.

Quinn, however, would much rather use her preternatural powers to start a punk band — and there is no man, woman, nor overzealous cyborg detective on Earth who can stop her…

The Aurealis Awards, which recognise original Australian speculative fiction published in the previous calendar year, is also celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of their founding in 1995. Thirty years, that’s quite an achievement.

A fantastic visualisation from Information is Beautiful. Selma, made in 2014 by Ava DuVernay, achieves a score of one-hundred percent. In other words, the plot is based on, so far as the researchers can tell, events that actually transpired.

The Social Network, made in 2010 by David Fincher, and a favourite of mine, has a score of about seventy-six, so nearly all true. I think most viewers realised screenwriters exercised some poetic licence, in a bid to keep the tension on the boil throughout.

Australian youth news outlet The Daily Aus (TDA), asked former Australian Liberal Party, and Opposition leader, Peter Dutton several times for a one-on-one interview, but he refused every time.

The same, apparently, went for former Liberal Party leader, and Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Both leaders refused to speak to TDA, both leaders went on to lose elections they subsequently faced, Dutton over the weekend, and Morrison in 2022.

Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meanwhile sat down with Billi FitzSimons, TDA’s editor-in-chief, in early February. Angus Taylor, the Opposition’s shadow treasurer, did however speak with FitzSimons in April (Instagram link). He was, I believe, the most senior Liberal Party/Opposition member to be interviewed by TDA.

FitzSimons, and TDA co-founder Zara Seidler, recounted the experience (palaver?) of attempting to invite Dutton to speak with them, in a recent podcast. Spoiler: Dutton seemed pretty obstinate, an attitude in general that probably cost him the 2025 election.

Melbourne and Bangkok, Thailand, based Australian artist Abdul Abdullah was named winner of the 2025 Archibald Prize Packing Room Prize yesterday, for his portrait — titled No mountain high enough — of Jason Phu.

The announcement of the Packing Room Prize is a bit like the beginning of Archibald Prize season, the annual arts award for Australian portraiture, and runs through to the closing of the Archibald exhibition, being Sunday 17 August this year.

Entry is open to any Australian artist, who’s painting was produced in the twelve months prior to the closing date for entries. The work should feature a “distinguished” Australian subject, usually in the arts, sciences, or politics, who, further, sat for the artist, face to face, while the work was produced.

Nearly two-thousand-four-hundred works were submitted this year, for the Archibald, together with the also annual Wynne (landscape painting), and Sulman (painting, genre, or mural painting) Prizes, the second highest of entries in the history of the prizes.

It can only be imagined how busy the loading dock at the Art Gallery of NSW must have been during the entry stage. The winners of all three awards will be announced next week, on Friday 9 May 2025.

Kirkus Reviews, an American literary publication, founded by teacher and editor Virginia Kirkus in 1933, has published a list of the best books — so far — of the twenty-first century.

It alarms me, as somewhat of a book reader, that I have not read even one of the fiction titles they list. I have seen a few of the film adaptations of some books though.

Australian cook Nagi Maehashi, founder of popular food blog RecipeTin Eats, and publisher of two cook books (her first title was riotously successful), has accused Brisbane based baker Brooke Bellamy, of copying at least two of her recipes.

In addition, Maehashi also claims Bellamy copied “word for word”, a Portuguese tart recipe, published by late Australian chef Bill Granger, in his 2006 cook book, Every Day.

I’m not sure you can copy a recipe for something like Portuguese tarts, but allegedly re-printing one verbatim might be another story:

It has historically been difficult to prove recipe plagiarism, especially when recipes such as baklava, caramel slice and Portuguese custard tarts are not original ideas but versions of traditional recipes that have been tweaked and replicated thousands of times.

Bellamy has denied the plagiarism allegations, saying all recipes in her book, Bake with Brooki, were her own original work.