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Digital inclusion for Indigenous communities is important. It’s so important, in fact, that the government has made it one of the targets under the Closing The Gap plan. The goal is: by 2026, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have equal levels of digital inclusion. Digital exclusion is the continuing unequal access and capacity to use digital technology that is essential to participate fully in society. It severely stifles Indigenous creativity. It restricts access to essential tools, skills and platforms that are crucial for digital expression and innovation. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, this exclu...... Read Full article on HadNews

When it comes to investing and planning your financial future, are you more willing to trust a person or a computer? This isn’t a hypothetical question any more. Big banks and investment firms are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help make financial predictions and give advice to clients. Morgan Stanley uses AI to mitigate the potential biases of its financial analysts when it comes to stock market predictions. And one of the world’s biggest investment banks, Goldman Sachs, recently announced it was trialling the use of AI to help write computer code, though the bank declined to say which division it was being used in. Other companie...... Read Full article on HadNews

Since 2019, the Australian Department for Industry, Science and Resources has been striving to make the nation a leader in “safe and responsible” artificial intelligence (AI). Key to this is a voluntary framework based on eight AI ethics principles, including “human-centred values”, “fairness” and “transparency and explainability”. Every subsequent piece of national guidance on AI has spun off these eight principles, imploring business, government and schools to put them into practice. But these voluntary principles have no real hold on organisations that develop and deploy AI systems. Last month, the Australian government started consult...... Read Full article on HadNews

Imagine you’re 90 years old, a grandmother of three and your husband is also elderly and ailing. You need help with almost everything, getting out of a chair, going to the bathroom, getting dressed, eating and remembering your medications. Despite advances in life expectancy, ageing has not been kind, and you feel like a burden to your husband and the healthcare professionals who care for you. Now, imagine being offered a robot that could help with many of these things – from walking to the bathroom to keeping track of your doctor’s appointments. This robot’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) learns your preferences, knows your birthday...... Read Full article on HadNews

Last week, two big names in the artificial intelligence (AI) and wellness industries announced a collaboration to develop a “customised, hyper-personalised AI health coach that will be available as a mobile app” to “reverse the trend lines on chronic diseases”. Sam Altman (head of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT) and Arianna Huffington (a former media executive who runs a high-tech wellness company called Thrive Global) announced their new company, Thrive AI Health, in a Time magazine advertorial. Health is an appealing direction for an AI industry that has promised to transform civilisation, but whose huge growth of the past couple of years is be...... Read Full article on HadNews

Evidence is mounting that the new generative AI internet search tools provided by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft can increase the risk of returning false, misleading or partially correct information. Despite the implications of this for the news industry and an informed democracy, the New Zealand government has decided to leave AI considerations out of its plans to revive the previous government’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. The proposed law will require Google and Meta (which runs Facebook and Instagram) to pay news companies for their content. While plenty of local news organisations receive money from Google, they don’t receive pay...... Read Full article on HadNews

Over the past decade, virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence, like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, have become integral to technologies such as smartphones and social media. More recently, a new type of human-like chatbots are on the rise: AI romantic companions. Chatbots are AI-powered programs that engage with humans through text, voice and images. Currently, over 100 AI-powered applications — such as myanima.ai, Eva AI, Nomi.AI and Replika — offer romantic and sexual companions with extensive personalization options, including physical and personality features. Exhibiting remarkable realism, adaptability and interactive ...... Read Full article on HadNews

Increasingly low-cost environmental sensors coupled with AI-powered analytical tools dangle the promise of faster and more insightful environmental planning. The need for better decision making about the way we use ecosystems and natural resources is even more urgent now because consenting changes proposed under the Fast-track Approvals Bill require faster assessments. As part of our research at Kuaha Matahiko, an open-access and collaborative project to compile data about land and water, we found a real thirst to engage with AI among iwi and hapū (tribal) groups. Overstretched environmental kaitiaki (guardian) organisations saw the possi...... Read Full article on HadNews

Photos of Australian children have been used without consent to train artificial intelligence (AI) models that generate images. A new report from the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch has found the personal information, including photos, of Australian children in a large data set called LAION-5B. This data set was created by accessing content from the publicly available internet. It contains links to some 5.85 billion images paired with captions. Companies use data sets like LAION-5B to “teach” their generative AI tools what visual content looks like. A generative AI tool like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion will then assembl...... Read Full article on HadNews

Political parties often like to say their candidates are different from the rest, but Smarter UK’s really is, because he isn’t human – he’s a creation of artificial intelligence (AI). The new political party believes its candidate, AI Steve, can put trust back into politics, at a time when trust has reached new lows. AI Steve is the AI avatar of Steve Endacott, who runs Neural Voice, the tech company behind Smarter UK’s campaign. Endacott the human ran and lost as a Conservative candidate in the 2022 local elections in Rochdale, where he lives. If AI Steve is elected by the constituents of Brighton Pavilion, Endacott will sit in parliament....... Read Full article on HadNews

Last week, several major record labels filed copyright infringement lawsuits in US courts against the makers of two generative AI music apps, Suno and Udio. The labels allege the AI companies have engaged in copyright infringement by copying many sound recordings belonging to the record labels, and producing outputs very similar to those recordings. The labels are seeking damages of US$150,000 (A$225,000) for each of the thousands of tracks of which copyright has allegedly been infringed. The lawsuits allege Udio produced output with “striking resemblances” to songs including Dancing Queen by ABBA and All I Want For Christmas Is You by Mar...... Read Full article on HadNews

You might have heard that artificial intelligence is going to revolutionize everything, save the world and give everyone superhuman powers. Alternatively, you might have heard that it will take your job, make you lazy and stupid, and make the world a cyberpunk dystopia. Consider another way to look at AI: as an assistive technology – something that helps you function. With that view, also consider a community of experts in giving and receiving assistance: the disability community. Many disabled people use technology extensively, both dedicated assistive technologies such as wheelchairs and general-use technologies such as smart home devices...... Read Full article on HadNews