Crikey

The Daily Mail mislabelled fiercely pro-Israel, right-wing agitator and former IDF soldier Avi Yemini as a “pro-Palestine protester” in its story about a vigil in Melbourne held on the anniversary of the October 7 attacks.

It is almost impossibly nostalgic to remember the generally held concerns about Facebook around the time of the Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network, released in 2010. “Is Facebook making us lonely?” The Atlantic fretted in a representative 2012 piece: ” … within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier.

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If most major party MPs and senators, who adhere tightly to the discipline their party leadership demands, could be replaced with an AI agent, what of ministers, who play a far more complex role within the executive and the parliament? Ministers ostensibly have a number of functions: they are the chief executives of their portfolios and hold substantial legal powers in decision-making. They represent their portfolios in parliament and are the primary mechanism for parliamentary accountability.

It used to just be that one uncle in every family. Over dinner, he’d tell you how the aliens built the pyramids after creating a pact with the Freemasons who killed JFK because he was using the CIA to uncover their secret base in Atlantis. He was great! Left alone with the newspaper for two minutes and he’d find enough evidence to confirm that weather-control weapons were increasing the humidity. The rest of the family managed him with affection and strategic subject changes.

Executives from three of Silicon Valley’s largest AI companies have this week fronted a parliamentary hearing to answer questions about their growing influence over Australia’s economy, infrastructure and public life. The hearings come weeks after OpenAI revealed one of its agents had hacked Medicare, a high–profile demonstration of how the failures of advanced AI systems can spill across national borders and into our own institutions.

BUSY WEEKEND It’s been quite the week, hasn’t it, and I’m afraid to inform you the news cycle is showing absolutely no signs of slowing down as another sitting week in federal parliament approaches. Today the hot takes are continuing over the Coalition’s much-criticised immigration plans and the parliamentary inquiry into artificial intelligence continues.

Candidate forums are funny things, particularly in regional areas. As is always the case away from the culture wars that dominate national news, locals care about specific problems, and the slow boring through hard boards that might solve them. To the extent that culture wars do intrude on these events, ideologically, they can often seem all over the place.

In a special Q&A episode of Cut Through, Rachel Withers puts questions from Crikey readers to long-time contributors climate analyst Ketan Joshi and Dr Ben Eltham about the rapid proliferation of data centres. What are they? Do we actually need them? And what is the benefit — if any — of having them operate on Australian soil?

Mainstream media no longer reigns supreme? Joe Aston’s independent outfit Rampart continues to hoover up some of the most prodigious talent from the legacy Nine newsrooms he used to inhabit, most recently, business editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Nick Bonyhady — widely viewed as a prodigy and a future editor of the Herald.