Meta using the work of Australian authors to train AI platforms

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Meta using the work of Australian authors to train AI platforms

7 April 2025

Two years ago it was ChatGPT being trained with books written by Australian authors, without their knowledge or permission. Now Facebook owner Meta is doing the same thing: using the works of local writers without permission or royalty.

A number of Australian authors, including Sophie Cunningham, Hannah Kent, Tim Winton, Helen Garner, and Alexis Wright, using a tool developed by The Atlantic, have found their work has been added to LibGen, a database Meta is using to “train” its generative AI platform.

The company claims their use of the novels constitutes fair use, as, apparently, only “limited” amounts of copyright material is being used.

If the Meta AI technology in question is what I saw on Instagram a day or two ago, on the search tab, then it’s not much to write home about. I typed my name in to see what would happen, something that appeared to stump the AI platform.

Instead of saying something about me, someone’s who been online here for over twenty-five years — how could Meta’s AI technology possibly not know about that? — it returned a spiel about an English football player called Frank, who has the same surname as I do.

If the writing of some of Australia’s best authors can’t help the technology figure out what day of the week it is, just how useful is this AI platform going to be?

The fifty best Microsoft products? This is not an April fool

3 April 2025

I wondered if this was an April’s fool joke. A list of the fifty best things Microsoft (MS) ever made, compiled by The Verge.

Among inclusions is Clippy, a well intentioned though sometimes annoying paperclip-like assistant, that shipped with Office 97. There’s also Slate Magazine, originally a MS publication. Solitaire is an obvious highlight. But no mention of NotePad. Or Windows NT4? This has to be an April fool’s prank.

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humour, technology

Don’t blame Apple for the failure of Apple Intelligence, blame AI

31 March 2025

Allison Morrow, writing for CNN:

Apple is not the laggard in AI. AI is the laggard in AI.

Here is a technology that’s still in the early days of development, has been hyped to the hilt, and heaped with lofty expectations. We’d call it vapour-ware if it didn’t actually exist. There’s some very smart people working at Apple, but it seems surprising they’d go promising the earth without better understanding what they were dealing with.

AI scraper bots like your website content, you should feel grateful

28 March 2025

Herman Martinus, creator of the Bear Blogging platform:

Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods, and while I now have systems in place to prevent it actually taking down the server, when it started happening a few months ago it certainly had an impact on performance.

I check my website stats every morning, and high hopes that something I wrote might have gone viral, wanes almost immediately when I realise AI scraper bots have been at it again.

I considered trying to block the data scrapers, but read that such methods are often ignored. I suppose I should feel faltered that developers of AI bots think the content published here is worthy of training one of their LLMs. There seems little else I can really do.

Auto generated Instagram comments, the smallest biggest AI threat

26 March 2025

Meta has been trailing an AI assistant that will help Instagram (IG) users compose comments for photos and video posted by their friends, says Aisha Malik, writing for TechCrunch:

Users who have access to the test feature will see a pencil icon next to the text bar under a post that they can tap to start accessing Meta AI, according to a video posted by Manzano. From there, Meta AI will analyze the photo before generating three suggestions for comments.

Awesome. Now we don’t even need to think up a comment to write about a friend’s photo on IG. What next then? AI is going to turning us all into beings incapable of original thought.

Man posts videos of himself propositioning Sydney women to his socials

26 March 2025

An unnamed American “content creator” recently asked a number of women — quite persistently at times — to go on dates with him, in and around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, NSW. He was however — unbeknown to the women in question — filming the interactions with smart-glasses, and later posting them to his social media accounts.

At least one woman asked him to take down a post she featured in, but he refused to comply. She also asked Instagram owner Meta to remove the footage, but the request was ignored. The women then spoke to NSW Police, who told her there was nothing they could do — even though NSW state surveillance laws were breached — as the man has since left Australia.

Here is another quagmire we’re walking into. Up until now it has been relatively apparent if a face-to-face interaction is being recorded in public. At the very least, a smartphone is being pointed at us.

But by way of a pair of glasses, with a camera that may not be easy to detect, is another matter. It might be against the law, in some states anyway, but if the wrong-doer is outside the country, it seems people out and about in public might have no legal recourse if the law has been broken.

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crime, social media, technology, trends

Do not buy a new computer: Microsoft should make a Windows 11 variant that works on old computers

24 March 2025

I’m no longer (thankfully) in the Windows fold, so I’m not one-hundred percent sure, but it seems like some older computers might not be able to run Microsoft’s (MS) most recent operating system (OS), Windows 11. Accordingly, owners of such devices seem intent to hold onto their existing machines, and stay on Windows 10, at the same time.

After all, do you really need to buy a new computer? If their present device is sufficient, why bother replacing it? That’s not the way MS sees things though. They want everyone to migrate to Win 11, come what may. Your existing computer is not up to running Win 11? No problem, simply buy a new device, and see if you can get a trade-in on the old one.

This is a suggestion MS has emailed to some Win 10 users recently. Evidently MS is unaware of the cost of living pressures some people are facing. And what sort of trade-in deal does MS think anyone will get from a device that cannot run Win 11, anyway? What an absurd notion: buy a new computer so you can upgrade to MS’s new OS.

People can continue using Win 10 on their computers for as long as they want, but will eventually stop receiving security updates. And running Win 10 without crucial updates would not be wise. The only safe way forward is to try another OS, such as Linux, but that’s not an option for everyone.

It’s doable of course, but there is something of a learning curve involved. I think the ball is in MS’s court though. They could do more to help people on older machines migrate to Win 11. One suggestion is to roll out a “light weight” version of Win 11 for those unable to change computers. This light version of Win 11 wouldn’t of course have the same capabilities as the full version, but for some people that might be a small price to pay.

I’m thinking a little of XFCE, the Linux Mint OS variant, designed to run on “low-end” personal computers. It could hardly be an onerous task for a company with the resources MS has at its disposal. Don’t make people buy a computer that suits your OS Microsoft: make an OS that suits the computers people already have.

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security, software, technology

Can artificial intelligence and smartphones even co-exist?

17 March 2025

Manton Reece:

But what if Apple has discovered that it’s not actually possible? AI is entirely new, with new requirements that stress the limits of hardware. Apple is attempting to cram a clever intermingling of data and Siri features into 8 GB of RAM. As a comparison, the largest version of DeepSeek R1 can only be run on a brand new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and 512 GB of RAM.

512 GB of RAM? Well, Apple’s AI offering won’t have a hope of working on my old SE2 device, with its three GB of RAM then. Not that I think Apple Intelligence will be available on older handsets anyway.

For all the bad press Apple Intelligence has been copping in recent weeks though, some people are finding various of the currently available features useful, as Amanda Caswell writes at Tom’s Guide.

Apple Intelligence, merely smoke and mirrors?

15 March 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

This is heavy duty.

Apple’s AI offering, Apple Intelligence, isn’t even artificial, it is very much non-existent.

Are there alternatives to the misunderstood, confusing, Fediverse?

12 March 2025

Dave Winer:

The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it’s trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn’t a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.

I’m supposed to understand the Fediverse — just another name for the web? — but sometimes feel the idea will go the way of the really simple RSS (just another way to follow a website). The concepts are easy for those in the know to comprehend, but seem to be utterly confusing for anyone else.

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