Beck Wise

People still think they don’t need to read black thinkers to do their work. They’re wrong and their work is worse for it.

AI used to imitate personalities defrauds Noosa council of $2.3m The mayor of a small council that lost nearly $2 million in a "sophisticated" scam says international fraudsters were able to "imitate personalities" using AI.

The mayor of a small council that lost nearly $2 million in a "sophisticated" scam says international fraudsters were able to "imitate personalities" using AI.

Upload your scanned ID they said. It will be fine they said.

Be the sort of person where even the rumor of your demise sparks a global depressive spiral and not the Ewok celebration from Return of the Jedi

Australian academic colleagues will want to fill this out: "The Australian University Census on Staff Wellbeing: An investigation of psychosocial safety climate in Australia's universities" doit.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

This would be why I am such a strident critic of digitization as a substitute for actual archival preservation. My sixteenth century documents are far sturdier and likely to survive another 500 years than the detritus on the internet. And digitization is not democratization.

It is, far and away, the most challenging thing I’ve encountered since entering the academy. And that is saying a lot. I might be working on this but I keep putting it aside because I’m not medicated enough to describe how demoralizing it all is.

Why Jimmy Kimmel would have never been cancelled in Australia We need to be careful about how we separate true hate speech from satirical speech. In America, it seems, differentiation is out of favour.

This is a bizarre thing to publish on the day the federal court awarded a journalist $220,000 for being unfairly dismissed from an on-air role for their political views.

In Australia it isn't just private companies that cave to pressure, it's the public broadcaster

www.smh.com.au/national/why...

“When we spoke to executives, they would often say the internal tool was very successful,” said Challapally. “But when we spoke to employees, we found zero usage.”

This must be the Rapture because I am dyingggg

When they say ai is a time saver what that often means is that it’s a tool that makes it easier for you to waste someone else’s time.

Leader of Albania Pelted With Trash for Appointing AI-Powered Minister to Cabinet The world's first AI government official is going about as well as you could expect.

🫡

I have been saying this for 3 years now; it is evident from even a theorerical understanding of these systems' operations. But ppl keep claiming it's not true or not important, or could be patched over, & so I keep hoping each time an "AI" company CEO comes out & admits will be the one that sticks

'Rotten' Australian university culture lashed in long-running senate inquiry Australia's universities are blighted by a "culture of consequence-free, rotten failure", a senate inquiry has found.

Australia's universities are blighted by a "culture of consequence-free, rotten failure", according to the former chair of a senate inquiry examining governance at public universities. ... "There's no other sector in the country where failure is rewarded so handsomely and with so little scrutiny."

Copies of multiple forms of ID, address history, employment history, and financial information that was about what I had to provide for a mortgage application. Then, once you become a tenant, they take photos of the property and all your possessions during inspections

Applying for a rental property in Australia currently requires you to hand over a horrifying amount of personal and financial information and I'm yet to get an adequate answer from a real estate company about how they protect the information of current and prospective tenants

The ARC is updating its AI policy for grants to reflect continued developments and invites feedback from the research community www.arc.gov.au/news-publica...

Jesus Christ.

In Australia working to contract like this is considered unprotected industrial action 🤷🏼‍♀️

This, and also they are saying you should assess and respond to the student work and then, uh, upload that to AI to get rewritten and then you should rewrite that? This is less work how?

Almost 30 staff at ANU humanities school stop work after health and safety report warns of ‘serious harm’ Workers affected by university restructure advised to ‘remove themselves from the hazardous work environment’ if they believe they are at psychosocial risk

The psychological distress across #ANU while Renew ANU has been underway has been enormous. @nteunion.bsky.social has been working with members to prevent the most serious outcomes.

It shouldn't have to come to this for the ANU to provide a safe workplace.

N E T U National Tertiary Education Union Cease Work Order in CASS A CASS Health and Safety Representative (HSR) has ordered that unsafe work cease due to psychosocial hazards and psychological injury resulting from Renew ANU NTEU is supporting the HSR and members in CASS. This email contains information on your rights in this situation

BREAKING | ANU staff in the College of Arts and Social Sciences have received a Cease Work Order due to dangerous working conditions. Under the WHS Act staff will be paid while this order is in place. The order seeks to protect lives and wellbeing.

Reckon they'll calculate these offsets based on that chatGPT-generated article claiming that LLMs have a lower carbon footprint than human writers based on a blog where some dude suggested Mark Twain's writing speed one week in Vienna "seems about average”, or…?

Holy flip. This entire announcement is wild but check out how they're going to deal with the rise in emissions from offering brute-force text generation software to students ->

I made the mistake of devoting myself to AI4SG early in my career because I wanted to believe I could use my skills to make the world a better place. Instead, I found exactly what Dr. Birhane describes - particularly with respect to accountability laundering. I'll share one example🧵

THAT'S RIGHT

Okay but maybe it is a bit easier to run away if the feelings' legs also broken?

Oxford University Press is introducing an AI summarisation & quizzing asst. into their law textbook ‘trove’: it took considerable effort from our Fac+Library to have them engineer in a license-level off switch (they initially refused!). They did not clock how important the skill of summarisation is.

Fascist tool erases fascist tool.

More than 80% of recruiters admit to posting ‘ghost jobs’ to juice their talent pool and business reputation Companies are trying to improve their reputation at the detriment of job-seekers.

Ghost jobs are a real danger for people living paycheck to paycheck. Someone teetering on the edge of poverty may spend precious hours, transportation money, and emotional energy applying to positions that don’t exist or are already filled.

calling all Australian researchers - see below. The ARC haven't circulated this survey very well.... thanks @arc-tracker.bsky.social for circulating!