{"id":74847,"date":"2025-08-17T10:49:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T10:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/74847\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T10:49:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T10:49:08","slug":"tech-lords-like-scott-farquhar-are-promising-an-ai-utopia-but-their-brave-new-world-might-be-a-dump-chatgpt-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/74847\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech lords like Scott Farquhar are promising an AI utopia. But their brave new world might be a dump; ChatGPT-5"},"content":{"rendered":"

At least two Australians are likely to benefit from Australian AI data centres. Skip Capital, the company Farquhar co-founded and co-owns with his wife, Kim Jackson, has invested in a company called Stack Infrastructure, which builds data centres. That means the tech billionaire proselytising about building data centres has a financial stake in a company that builds data centres.<\/p>\n

\"Sam<\/p>\n

Sam Altman is OpenAI\u2019s co-founder and chief executive.Credit: AP<\/p>\n

The council\u2019s wish list also includes \u201cimproved planning<\/a> approvals to move fast both on the energy and approving of data centres\u201d. This desire to loosen existing regulations suggests they would like something akin to the US AI Action Plan, which was unveiled by the Trump administration in July. That policy road map aims to remove roadblocks<\/a> so that AI innovation in the US can sprint ahead, unfettered by pesky investigations into monopolies, third-party audits of their technology, regulations for misleading advertising or environmental protections.<\/p>\n

The AI Action Plan paid no heed to the growing chorus asking whether an industry that has already received close to $1 trillion in investment and has a history of over-promising and under-delivering deserves to receive even more assistance and less regulation. As Matteo Wong, a tech writer for The Atlantic, wrote<\/a>: \u201cAI products remain error-prone, extremely expensive to build and (are) unproven in many business applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gary Marcus, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, and a forceful critic of the hype surrounding AI, bluntly said:<\/a>, \u201cWe have been fed a steady diet of bullshit (from AI companies) for the last several years.\u201d He doesn\u2019t believe that the tech lords can deliver on their AI promises and has called for regulation of AI, a move that would seem essential, given that it was less than two years ago that the board of Open AI was so concerned about Altman\u2019s handling of AI safety issues (which address the misuse and harmful consequences of AI) that they launched a failed coup to oust him.<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

Whether the text and data mining exemption goes through, or Australia instead gets AI-specific legislation that provides oversight of a currently unregulated and unproven industry, will be up to our politicians. At the 2023 launch of the government\u2019s culture policy, our music-loving prime minister gave a heartfelt speech, in which he committed to supporting the artist as worker and said: \u201cThis is about our soul \u2026 who we are and our quality of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the Albanese government ends up giving the green light to the exemption, it will allow billionaires to steal entire lifetimes of work from some of Australia\u2019s lowest-paid workers so that tech companies, owned by some of the richest people in the world, can profit off artists\u2019 labour in perpetuity. It\u2019s therefore not only the words of Australian authors that are being weighed for their value in the AI debate. As we wait to see which direction the spaceship will take, we\u2019re also about to find out if the words of our politicians have any value at all.<\/p>\n

Melanie La\u2019Brooy is an award-winning Australian children\u2019s author.<\/p>\n

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At least two Australians are likely to benefit from Australian AI data centres. Skip Capital, the company Farquhar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-74847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}