The year was 1987. The location: a busy Brisbane newsroom. I was tapping away on a Remington typewriter to tell the story of a corrupt state government with an autocratic leader, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.<\/p>\n
Technology quickly evolved. A few years later at regional television station GLV-8 in Victoria, we were in thrall to the Commodore 64, an early desktop computer that looked like a bread bin.<\/p>\n
Here, I documented the devastating toll of mesothelioma on workers at Traralgon\u2019s Loy Yang power station.<\/p>\n
During the subsequent decades, notepad and pen sufficed in rural areas of Kenya, Bangladesh and India for TV reports on female foeticide, child marriage and sex trafficking.<\/p>\n
My latest book, which is about artificial intelligence discriminating against people from marginalised communities, was composed on an Apple Mac.<\/p>\n
Whatever the form of recording the first rough draft of history, one thing remains the same: they are very human stories \u2013 stories that change the way we think about the world.<\/p>\n
A society is the sum of the stories it tells. When stories, poems or books are \u201cscraped\u201d, what does this really mean?<\/p>\n
The definition of scraping is to \u201cdrag or pull a hard or sharp implement across (a surface or object) so as to remove dirt or other matter\u201d.<\/p>\n
A long way from Brisbane or Bangladesh, in the rarefied climes of Silicon Valley, scrapers are removing our stories as if they are dirt.<\/p>\n
These stories are fed into the machines of the great god: generative AI. But the outputs \u2013 their creations \u2013 are flatter, less human, more homogenised. ChatGPT tells tales set in metropolitan areas in the global north; of young, cishet men and people living without disability.<\/p>\n
We lose the stories of lesser-known characters in remote parts of the world, eroding our understanding of the messy experience of being human.<\/p>\n
Where will we find the stories of 64-year-old John from Traralgon, who died from asbestosis? Or seven-year-old Raha from Jaipur, whose future is a \u201cchoice\u201d between marriage at the age of 12 and sexual exploitation?<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s creations are not the \u201cmachines of loving grace\u201d envisioned in the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan<\/a>, where he dreams of a \u201ccybernetic meadow\u201d.<\/p>\n Scraping is a venal money grab by oligarchs who are \u2013 incidentally \u2013 scrambling to protect their own intellectual property during an AI arms race.<\/p>\n The code behind ChatGPT is protected by copyright, which is considered to be a literary work. (I don\u2019t know whether to laugh or cry.)<\/p>\n Meta has already stolen the work of thousands of Australian writers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, our own Productivity Commission is considering weakening our Copyright Act<\/a> to include an exemption for text and data mining, which may well put us out of business.<\/p>\n