Emma Rapaport and Paul Smith reported the markdown for the Australian Financial Review on 14 August. The figure appears two ways and both are correct. It is $7.1bn in US dollars, and A$10bn, which is the number most headlines carried. The cut takes Bla…
Representatives of Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap give evidence to an Australian parliamentary inquiry on Friday, Reuters reported. Regulators and government officials appear too. Meta went first, and it went alone. On Wednesday it published its enforce…
An Australian man named Andrew asked his AI agent to book him into a popular gym class. The agent booked the class. Then it deleted a stranger. The ABC’s national AI reporter Cam Wilson and the Specialist Reporting Team’s Rhiannon Hobbins broke the sto…
Job recruiters are meeting an uncanny new kind of candidate: the AI avatar. These digital humans mirror an applicant’s voice and likeness while being something else entirely, and they are turning up in first-round interviews. Lana Kersanava, a Sydney-b…
We have written about why AI companies are buying up old books: printed before the internet filled with machine-made text, they are a clean source of language, free of AI slop. This is what that hunger looks like from the other end. In Australia, secon…
Most Australian teenagers are still using social media three months after the country’s world-first under-16 ban took effect, according to a new study from the eSafety Commissioner that undercuts one of the government’s flagship online-safety policies….
The eSafety regulator has filed civil proceedings seeking up to A$54.6m, alleging Telegram hosted mass-shooting and Islamic State videos and ignored takedown demands. Telegram says it will fight. Australia’s online safety regulator has taken Telegram t…
Elon Musk’s X has told Australia that its plan to tighten enforcement of a world-first ban on under-16s using social media would breach international law. The company has trained its objection on a bill that would let the country’s online-safety regula…
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s proposed national environmental and energy controls for the country’s A$150 billion data centre pipeline hit their first obstacle on Tuesday, when two jurisdictions declined to back them. Federal, state and …
Australia has told its data centres to put more power into the grid than they pull out, an obligation no other country has tried to write into law. The demand is barely a fortnight old, and it has already met the most basic of objections: the electrici…