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.
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.
Here, I documented the devastating toll of mesothelioma on workers at Traralgon’s Loy Yang power station.
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.
My latest book, which is about artificial intelligence discriminating against people from marginalised communities, was composed on an Apple Mac.
Whatever the form of recording the first rough draft of history, one thing remains the same: they are very human stories – stories that change the way we think about the world.
A society is the sum of the stories it tells. When stories, poems or books are “scraped”, what does this really mean?
The definition of scraping is to “drag or pull a hard or sharp implement across (a surface or object) so as to remove dirt or other matter”.
A long way from Brisbane or Bangladesh, in the rarefied climes of Silicon Valley, scrapers are removing our stories as if they are dirt.
These stories are fed into the machines of the great god: generative AI. But the outputs – their creations – 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.
We lose the stories of lesser-known characters in remote parts of the world, eroding our understanding of the messy experience of being human.
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 “choice” between marriage at the age of 12 and sexual exploitation?
OpenAI’s creations are not the “machines of loving grace” envisioned in the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, where he dreams of a “cybernetic meadow”.
Scraping is a venal money grab by oligarchs who are – incidentally – scrambling to protect their own intellectual property during an AI arms race.
The code behind ChatGPT is protected by copyright, which is considered to be a literary work. (I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.)
Meta has already stolen the work of thousands of Australian writers.
Now, our own Productivity Commission is considering weakening our Copyright Act to include an exemption for text and data mining, which may well put us out of business.
In its response, The Australia Institute uses the analogy of a car: “Imagine grabbing the keys for a rental car and just driving around for a while without paying to hire it or filling in any paperwork. Then imagine that instead of being prosecuted for breaking the law, the government changed the law to make driving around in a rental car legal.”
It’s more like taking a piece out of someone’s soul, chucking it into a machine and making it into something entirely different. Ugly. Inhuman.
The commission’s report seems to be an absurdist text. The argument for watering down copyright is that it will lead to more innovation. But the explicit purpose of the Copyright Act is to protect innovation, in the form of creative endeavour.
Our work is being devalued, dismissed and destroyed; our livelihoods demolished.
In this age of techno-capitalism, it appears the only worthwhile innovation is being built by the “brogrammers”.
US companies are pinching Australian content, using it to train their models, then selling it back to us. It’s an extractive industry: neocolonialism, writ large.
The commission is convinced of an estimated $116bn economic windfall over the next decade, fuelled by digital technologies.
Yes, AI will boost productivity. But if you believe that figure, I have a lovely Harbour Bridge to sell you.
Let’s take a moment to engage in critical thinking. What else increases productivity?
Eliminating distractions, often in the form of mobile phones. Treating workers as humans instead of robots, incorporating regular breaks to improve performance. And, believe it or not, training in touch-typing.
It’s worth remembering we live in a society, not an economy. We aren’t automatons. At least, not yet. Sharing stories through writing, images and music is the bedrock of the evolution of humanity.
If we want to keep evolving, we should think twice before following the latest charlatans.
• Tracey Spicer AM is the author of Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past is Being Built into the Future
