David

Professor Anne Twomey came to Perth recently to give a talk about the importance of scrutiny of legislation and the dangers of rushing bills through parliament. It was fascinating (at least to me).

New episode just dropped! For those in Victoria: the state election is soon! So I've made an explainer about how voting works (but don't worry I won't preach to you about policy or which party to pick): youtu.be/8gfBvxfyPhk

I previously had a video about how voting works in Victorian state elections. With recent changes to electoral laws that abolish group voting tickets that episode is out of date and has been taken down. For up to date information always check the electoral commission website www.vec.vic.gov.au

From a corporate perspective if Gen AI output is more realistic/convincing than a competing AI then it's a superior product. But that same metric means as it "improves" it becomes a more dangerous tool for misinformation and political disruption.

Limitations that make AI safer also make AI less useful, marketable or profitable. But it's also a tool that can be manipulated to shape public opinion against any regulations a government tries to impose to protect its citizens from harm. It's the new way to lobby MPs and manipulate politics.

AI is the largest existential threat to democracy. Every facet of it can be misused and weaponised to undermine public understanding of democratic institutions, the law and legislative process, and mislead and manipulate both the electorate and MPs themselves.

It's not a matter of "if" AI will horrifically damage democracy around the world - it’s a matter of how much harm it'll cause. It's already eroding our democracy now. It's already a tool for election interference and misinformation.

AI is the largest existential threat to democracy. Every facet of it can be misused and weaponised to undermine public understanding of democratic institutions, the law and legislative process, and mislead and manipulate both the electorate and MPs themselves.

If an electorate office is getting 10,000 emails from AI pushing for a certain policy then how will that MP know what's a genuine request? How can they have time for any other requests? The electorate's desires will become completely disconnected from MPs actions and further entrench distrust.

AI is the largest existential threat to democracy. Every facet of it can be misused and weaponised to undermine public understanding of democratic institutions, the law and legislative process, and mislead and manipulate both the electorate and MPs themselves.

I literally cannot stress this enough: asking AI to explain any kind of law, policy, government decision, or what parties stand for is an inherently bad idea. At best you will be misinformed and at worst you will be manipulated towards whatever bias has been fed into the AI, intentionally or not.

AI is the largest existential threat to democracy. Every facet of it can be misused and weaponised to undermine public understanding of democratic institutions, the law and legislative process, and mislead and manipulate both the electorate and MPs themselves.

Imagine the government makes a policy that upsets a tech company that has an AI model on millions of phones worldwide. You think that can't be used to manipulate what information people read? Vested interests has never had a greater ability to manipulate public opinion.

AI is the largest existential threat to democracy. Every facet of it can be misused and weaponised to undermine public understanding of democratic institutions, the law and legislative process, and mislead and manipulate both the electorate and MPs themselves.

As AI cannot critically distinguish between fact and lies and the vast amount of data required to train models is too big to manually curate and fact check, it's impossible to ensure accuracy. If you rely on AI to explain ANYTHING political you risk being victim of misinformation.

AI is the largest existential threat to democracy. Every facet of it can be misused and weaponised to undermine public understanding of democratic institutions, the law and legislative process, and mislead and manipulate both the electorate and MPs themselves.

AI programs like ChatGPT/ Claude/Gemini are trained to recognise patterns. You feed it enough text and it "learns" that the next word after "my name is..." is likely going to be a name not "pineapple". It mimics human language but it doesn't understand it. This appears impressive but is exploitable.

Good news! I finally got the quote to repair my camera lens and the sensor that was damaged by that pesky moth! It is $743 which is... oof. OK. At least in a couple weeks I'll be back in action. I can confidently say that is the most a single moth has ever cost me and moths are now my mortal enemy.

Remember, if there's something important to you then you should contact your local MP and Senators to tell them about it and why they should act on it: www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and...

A MOTH GOT INTO MY CAMERA LENS AND DIED??? It also scratched up my camera sensor so both the lens and camera I use for filming Auspol Explained videos is in for repair! Thankfully I filmed a couple episodes before the moth appeared so I've got something to edit but it'll be out of action for a while

Let's get down to bzzzzness* (learning about how amendments are made) youtu.be/P_e-LqouX80