0:00

ABC Listen, podcasts,

0:02

radio, news,

0:04

music and more. Hello?

0:09

Can you hear me?

0:15

Or are you just with Optus? Yes, this week on

0:17

Download This Show, how did one of Australia's

0:19

biggest telecommunications companies

0:22

leave millions of customers with no phone

0:24

service or access to the internet for several

0:27

hours? Also on the show, the crypto

0:29

king is found guilty of fraud

0:32

and Facebook's new rules on fact-checking

0:35

AI ads. All of that and much more coming up.

0:37

This is your guide to the week in media,

0:39

technology and culture. My name

0:42

is Mark Finnell and welcome

0:43

to Download This Show.

0:46

Yes, indeed, it is

0:48

a brand new episode

0:52

of Download This Show.

0:58

And a big welcome to Jessica Sire, tech reporter

1:00

for the Australian Financial Review. Don't laugh at me, you

1:02

already put the show in and started and you're laughing

1:04

at me. Hello, welcome to the show. And a

1:07

newly de-mustachioed Alex McCauley,

1:09

the founder of the Tech Council. Welcome

1:11

back. Thank you, Mark. I thought one of the things

1:14

about radio was you didn't have to talk about your appearance.

1:16

Some of us like to objectify the guests and today

1:18

it's you. It's lovely to have you both

1:20

here in studio today. And good news that you actually

1:22

got the message to be here given

1:24

one of Australia's biggest telecommunications

1:26

company was out not that long ago. Much

1:29

hand wringing has been done around the Optus outage

1:31

of last week. To the best

1:33

of our knowledge, and I should say that we do record

1:35

this a little bit earlier than it goes to air, so

1:37

this information may change over time. But to the best of

1:39

our knowledge, Jess,

1:41

give me the tick tock of what happened on the day. Well,

1:44

none of our phones worked. Some of the

1:46

trains in Melbourne didn't work. No

1:49

one could call triple zero for a while. Lots

1:51

of payments couldn't be accepted in cafes

1:53

and restaurants around the country. As far

1:55

as we understand, it was a network,

1:58

a technical network fault.

2:00

I don't know what that means. And I dare say

2:02

lots of people don't. Do

2:04

you know? I think you're from the tech

2:07

council. I definitely

2:09

don't know. When something like this happens,

2:11

where do they start with an investigation? Like just

2:13

in general terms? I presume Optus

2:16

knows more about what the fault is than they've said to the media,

2:18

or therefore that I've read about, and they

2:20

will no doubt cooperate with

2:23

investigators because it's in their interest to do so. But

2:26

I imagine it will take some time to really get to the bottom of where,

2:29

why, and how to stop it from happening again. How

2:31

did you evaluate the communication, Alex?

2:34

From Optus?

2:35

Well, it was slow to come.

2:38

It's almost like the people that work at Optus Comms had

2:41

Optus phones. Well, exactly. If

2:43

you could receive the communication, you know, you

2:46

were doing pretty well to start with. There

2:48

have been a few times over the last year or two where

2:50

Optus has been under the spotlight for their communications,

2:53

and I don't know if they covered themselves in glory yesterday

2:55

either. What do you think, Zis? I think it was awful,

2:57

I think, to not get on the front foot

3:00

of an event like this, which affected

3:02

so many people. Like, it's so different if like your

3:05

app doesn't

3:05

work, or your cafe doesn't open,

3:07

or your gym, or whatever.

3:09

This is like a piece of critical infrastructure

3:11

that affects so many lives,

3:13

and just the operations of the country,

3:16

and to not have clear communication

3:20

so that the media can do their job and broadcast that

3:22

to more people. I think it was really

3:24

like a failing. The way that it's handled, and I

3:26

don't know how much your listeners are interested

3:29

in

3:30

how

3:32

the media sausage is made, but the idea

3:35

of like the executive going out and speaking to

3:37

individual media outlets at disparate times

3:39

during the day and giving out bits of information

3:42

is just so unhelpful.

3:44

Not just for journalists trying to do their jobs, but

3:47

for customers trying to figure out, all businesses

3:49

trying to figure out whether or not they're going

3:51

to be online in the next 24 hours

3:53

or something. I think it was a real failing. We should have learned

3:55

something a little bit from the pandemic where

3:57

actually there is benefit in like communal practice. conference

4:01

where everyone finds out. That's all they had to do is

4:03

hold a press conference

4:04

and then all the press gets the same message at

4:06

the same time and then disseminates

4:08

it for their audiences. It's just not a

4:10

tricky thing to manage. And the thing is

4:12

because the outage went on for so long

4:15

and there was no information forthcoming,

4:17

the gap of information just gets filled

4:19

with speculation and you just kind of

4:21

want to manage that I think. When

4:23

this happens overseas, I know there was

4:25

a I won't say the same story, but a

4:27

story with some similar touchpoints in Canada.

4:30

I think it was copies some time ago and

4:32

they have looked at enforcing a situation where

4:35

if a telco goes down, there's almost like a forced roaming

4:37

thing that happens where if you go down, if you know

4:39

you go down, you almost

4:41

like global roaming. You get handed over to another telecommunications

4:44

company except this time it's not in another country.

4:46

It's the one in the same country. What's

4:49

stopping us from doing that?

4:51

Is there anything stopping us from doing that? I

4:53

presume just, I mean, firstly, brilliant

4:56

idea. Obviously it should be there. This

4:58

is, as we just said, critical infrastructure

5:01

that can't be allowed to just be down all

5:03

day. And I

5:05

presume the only thing that's happening is competition,

5:07

you know, unless they're forced to do it. Why

5:10

would they do it? You'd have to figure that that must

5:12

come up in the forthcoming inquiry,

5:14

right?

5:15

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that is the answer.

5:17

I think telcos in Australia have been

5:19

really reluctant to share their spectrum

5:22

or their bandwidth with each other because

5:24

of the fear that it'll eat into their market

5:26

share. But I think, I mean, the government's made

5:29

so many strides in the last 12 months, two

5:31

years to ensure that Australia's critical infrastructure

5:34

is protected, particularly from nation

5:36

states and cyber attacks and things like this. The

5:39

idea that Optus had some

5:41

kind of single point of failure like this

5:43

is just, yeah,

5:46

I mean, they deserve the scrutiny. They deserve.

5:48

And perhaps that's part of the communications thing

5:50

is like, we don't want to have someone saying,

5:52

well, why did you have such a single

5:54

point of failure that seemed to cascade throughout the entire

5:56

business and you couldn't fix it for 12 hours? I mean, don't you? war

6:00

game this kind of scenario. I

6:02

mean it's going to get more and more difficult for a

6:04

company of this size to avoid that kind

6:06

of scrutiny. Did it change how you feel

6:08

about our reliance on technology, Alex? No,

6:12

but it did make me sad

6:14

that it

6:16

will give a lot of ammo to people

6:19

who don't want us to be so

6:21

reliant on technology, don't want the world to move forward in that

6:23

way. I listened to the

6:25

Great ABC this morning on a bit of TalkBack Radio and

6:27

there were lots of people calling in saying, oh, I

6:29

only use cash and this is why. I think

6:31

that will give a bit more credit

6:34

to that kind of philosophy for a bit longer,

6:37

which I just think is annoying from my perspective. I always

6:40

might disagree. Did it change how you feel about

6:42

our reliance on technology, Jess?

6:44

No, it just changed the way I

6:46

feel about Optus as a manager

6:48

of critical infrastructure.

6:50

The amount of data that most of

6:52

the bandwidth of these companies or the spectrum, as

6:54

they say, is data moving

6:57

around in packets across

6:59

all of our devices. The way that we do

7:01

our jobs, the way the economy is run

7:03

is across these networks

7:05

and through these channels. If

7:07

you want to make money by providing

7:10

the channels to all of us, you've got

7:12

to make sure those channels work. Whether

7:16

or not we use technology less,

7:18

it's kind of nice. If the

7:20

phones go down for a while, sure.

7:23

If you're in the bush and you're having a nice time or whatever,

7:25

but I'm a journey man.

7:27

Every time I tried to make a call yesterday,

7:29

I couldn't do it and I'd have to go and signal

7:32

it. What's hilarious is some of the people I was calling

7:34

were like, Jess, why are you

7:36

calling

7:36

me on signal? Is something secret happening?

7:38

Because I was on the Wi-Fi. Oh, right. I was like, how

7:41

are you getting signal to work? Yeah, but I'm calling

7:43

through all these other channels and

7:46

people were really sus on why I was calling on

7:48

these, usually quite surreptitious apps. I

7:50

suddenly became hyper aware of free

7:53

Wi-Fi spots. In that way

7:55

that you only ever do when you're like, overseas

7:57

backpacking. Right. Yeah, it had a very

7:59

backpacking. It's interesting the

8:01

thing you were saying, Alex, about people

8:04

who are, let's

8:06

say, tech-averse, beyond the

8:08

fact that you're from the tech council. Why

8:11

does it bother you? It doesn't bother me at an individual

8:13

level at all. I think the point I was making

8:15

was really just, you know, there's always

8:17

resistance to things like going cashless,

8:19

et cetera. You know, I've loved this

8:21

sort of ubiquity recently of being

8:24

able to tap your card or tap your phone. I've

8:26

sort of been proud of Australia for being out in front

8:28

on that stuff when I travel to the U.S. and people are still paying

8:30

with checks. I'm like, so I kind of I

8:32

love that. And I love that we're sort of out in front

8:34

of it. And anything like this tends

8:36

to hold that back, I think. It's also

8:39

why I never know where my wallet is anymore. Download

8:42

this show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the week

8:44

in media, technology and culture. I should say that

8:46

we are recording this a few days before it goes to where.

8:48

So there may be new information that comes out between

8:50

when we've recorded this and when we go to where. So

8:52

just bear that in mind as you're listening. It is your

8:54

guide to the week in media, technology and culture. Jess,

8:58

the biggest story in crypto has been unfolding

9:00

in the U.S. and you have been talking about

9:02

it. Tell me what's happened. So

9:05

Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder

9:07

of a crypto exchange called FTX, which

9:09

was very, very popular until about

9:13

November last year when it collapsed.

9:16

I think it's spectacularly collapsed. Spectacularly

9:18

blew up and about

9:21

eight billion dollars was missing

9:24

from this of customer money was missing from

9:26

this exchange and the

9:29

trial of the founder and the CEO of

9:31

the FTX exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried was

9:33

found guilty of seven

9:35

counts

9:36

of fraud and conspiracy

9:38

to commit fraud. And

9:40

we're just sort of hanging about waiting to

9:42

see how

9:42

much time in jail he's going to get.

9:45

Time and jail is important, but also what happened

9:48

to the money? Through

9:50

that process, did we find out? Oh,

9:52

yeah. So FTX was run by a bunch

9:54

of like 28, 29, 30 year

9:57

old crypto people and they all came from

9:59

like quant trading. land. So they were all...

10:01

Quantrading is like where you use really

10:03

fast internet speeds and

10:05

information to eke out tiny

10:07

little trading gains. And so they'd

10:10

set up this exchange. And in parallel

10:12

to this crypto exchange where we could all get on there

10:14

and we could buy and sell cryptocurrencies. And

10:16

what made FTX so popular in the first instance

10:19

was that you could trade on margin,

10:21

which means you could

10:21

borrow money to maximize

10:24

your trade. So if you had $100,

10:27

you could borrow, say $100 more. And

10:29

if you double your money, you double your money.

10:31

Right. But the problem with that is that you can

10:34

be wiped out as well. And so anyway,

10:36

so FTX is really popular because you could trade on margin

10:39

and so people could amplify their bets. They

10:41

also had a Quantrading

10:44

firm, a hedge fund that Sam Bank McFreed

10:46

and his geeky friends were running on the side.

10:49

The business of that hedge fund was only

10:51

to make money. They

10:53

were not very good at making money for

10:55

a period of time. And to plug

10:58

a massive hole in their balance sheet, they took $8

11:00

billion of FTX

11:02

customer money and brought it over to

11:05

Alameda Research. That was the hedge fund's name and

11:07

kind of

11:08

lost that. So that's

11:10

what we found out in the trial was exactly

11:13

how those mechanisms worked, how that

11:15

money moved across and the fact that

11:17

Mr. Bank McFreed knew about it the

11:19

whole time. And also earned Alameda Research.

11:21

Yeah. 100%. Yeah. It was his hedge fund. So

11:24

we can basically clock with an egg timer

11:27

how long it'll take for somebody to turn this into one

11:29

of those docudramas. I reckon it's underway.

11:31

Michael Lewis, this financial journal who

11:34

wrote Moneyball, that movie has

11:36

already published a book

11:37

because he was randomly tailing

11:39

Sam Bank McFreed or SPF as he's known in the

11:41

industry. He was tailing this guy for the 12 months before

11:44

the collapse even happened. So like on

11:46

the day... He

11:46

knew something we didn't. Well,

11:48

I think it was just like a crazy story, right?

11:50

This 29-year-old dude from like Stanford

11:53

University or MIT, but his parents were

11:55

Stanford professors, just all of a sudden

11:57

is like worth billions and billions

11:59

of dollars. in the space

12:00

of two years, like wild. So. Like

12:03

the greatest hits of everything that was terrible about tech bros.

12:05

All right, yeah. Has this changed

12:08

how you think people will take up and

12:11

engage with cryptocurrencies? Because cryptocurrencies

12:13

are unlikely to go anywhere, but

12:15

I do think you'd have to acknowledge it's gonna

12:18

take, it takes a hit on its confidence

12:20

level. Oh yeah, I mean, well, does the verdicts

12:22

change it? I don't know, probably not. I mean, the $8 billion

12:25

loss. Yeah, the $8 billion loss has changed already.

12:27

I mean, crypto is, and web three even

12:29

have been off the agenda really

12:31

for the last year or so. It's really been a huge hard

12:34

crash since about Q1 last year. Okay,

12:36

so there's a shift in the center of gravity

12:39

in the tech world where once upon a time, everyone wanted

12:41

to talk about cryptocurrencies. And

12:43

I suppose I'd probably put non

12:47

fungible tokens in there as well and web

12:49

three. And now everyone's gone AI. Well,

12:52

not everyone, but there's a shift in people's

12:54

focus and attention.

12:56

Cryptocurrency is,

12:59

for lack of a better term, still a thing.

13:01

There's still a number of them out there. Some of them are

13:03

very stable. Some of them are not. What

13:06

we've got here is a situation where it's one, you

13:08

know, spectacular crash of an exchange.

13:11

Do we see other exchanges kind

13:14

of doing things to build confidence

13:17

in it as a marketplace?

13:20

I mean, I don't have any real visibility

13:22

over any of the other exchanges doing anything particular. I

13:24

think most of the people I speak to aren't

13:27

just talking about crypto anymore. They're not investing

13:29

in it. They don't invest in companies

13:32

that are doing anything with it. So I suspect it's just in

13:34

a bit of a hiatus in between, you

13:36

know, phases. Crypto has always

13:38

been pretty cyclical. You look

13:40

at the price of Bitcoin over the last 10 or 15 years. It's

13:43

got huge ups and downs. And this is definitely a sort

13:45

of down in interest and price. But

13:47

I don't think it's done by the means.

13:50

Is it like, punk, it's not dead. It's just gone to bed.

13:52

Yeah, a

13:52

bit like that, I think. What's

13:55

remarkable about this massive collapse and Sam

13:58

Bankman Fried being found? guilty of all these charges

14:01

is like he was found guilty of fraud,

14:04

which is old as time. Like whether

14:06

you're doing it with digital assets, whether you're doing it with

14:08

whatever widget, whatever market,

14:11

what he did was failed

14:13

to have any

14:14

dominance controls or quality controls

14:16

on the

14:16

processes in a business. I

14:19

think the weird wash up of all this is

14:21

like all the crypto exchanges that are still in operation

14:24

who perhaps were running things a bit loosey

14:26

goosey are tightening

14:29

it up really, really fast because

14:31

they

14:31

have seen that this guy, you can be found

14:33

guilty of fraud even if you're operating in the

14:35

wild west of crypto.

14:37

We talk a lot about

14:39

there not being enough regulation for crypto

14:41

businesses and in laws they

14:43

aren't defined and so that's sure that's an issue

14:46

or whatever. But when you're taking customer

14:48

money to plug your losses in another

14:50

business, that's pretty straightforward,

14:52

that's pretty black and white and

14:53

the law will find you. Download

14:55

the show is what you're listening to and speaking

14:58

of things about AI, Meta, the

15:01

company that own Facebook and Instagram

15:04

announced an interesting new policy around

15:06

political advertising and AI. Alex, what happened?

15:09

Yeah, this is a really interesting story. So it's basically

15:12

Meta saying if you've used AI

15:14

to generate content, you've got to say so. You've

15:17

got to label it as having been made

15:19

with AI and so they're

15:21

envisaging people particularly in the lead

15:23

up to next year's US election.

15:26

They're envisaging people making

15:29

videos and images and stories about

15:32

stuff that didn't really happen, about a future

15:34

that they're imagining but which is

15:36

AI generated and they're saying

15:38

you've got to put a label on that so that people who

15:40

are looking at it know that it's not necessarily reality. Is

15:43

it specifically just stuff that's advertising

15:45

or is it all content? I understood it to be

15:47

specifically stuff that's advertising. Okay,

15:49

so here's why I'm curious about it, right? Because

15:51

when it comes to content around a US

15:54

presidential election, which I'm sure will be very

15:57

civil, I don't think the issue is necessarily

15:59

political. I think it's a good thing conceptually. I

16:03

don't think the issue is going to be stuff that comes from the DNC

16:05

and the RNC. I think it's going to be the wild

16:08

amount of meme content that

16:11

gets out there that has there is no

16:13

control over. That's the stuff that will

16:15

be the problem. Thoughts and feelings,

16:17

Jess? Jess You know,

16:18

yeah, you've just painted like such an image

16:20

in my mind of like this wave of just

16:22

garbage internet content

16:25

that's about to like be an onslaught

16:27

into our lives. I wish that there existed

16:29

something like drug testing for this, but you could

16:31

just sort of drop a couple of drops in your powder

16:34

just and it turns a color and you go, ah, fake

16:36

or like it's this. I wish that

16:38

there were more tools for running content

16:40

through so that users can start to

16:43

manage themselves.

16:44

I mean, well, it's actually interesting because there is an

16:46

idea called content credentials. I think we talked about last week on

16:48

the show where there you should

16:50

be able to click on images and see how have they

16:53

been edited. And I know Adobe,

16:55

who are the people obviously behind Photoshop, who

16:57

are actually out there selling their ability to,

16:59

you know, have generative

17:02

AI in pictures now. I've seen all their advertising.

17:04

They've now, I think in concert with that function,

17:07

added a tool where you can actually see like, we

17:09

cropped this, we added a unicorn and those things

17:12

like that. I think there's likely to

17:14

be more of that stuff that comes out, but whether or not

17:16

people actually use it and

17:18

are aware of it. Paul Well, I mean, this isn't a new

17:20

topic, right? I mean, we've been talking about fake news on

17:22

social media and particularly on Facebook with relation

17:24

to the US presidential election since 2016, really

17:28

since Trump won the first time. And

17:30

it's less about whether you use AI to generate the content

17:33

and more about whether the content is fake news. And

17:36

there's a continuing conversation with

17:38

all the social media providers about the level with

17:41

which they should be assessing content, not

17:43

just ads, which is what this is about, but

17:45

all content on the platform for

17:47

veracity and labeling it. I mean, I think Twitter

17:50

did it, has done it the last couple of elections. And

17:53

I think they XX now is not

17:55

doing it. I think they've moved away from that. No,

17:59

this is definitely a conversation. not just for the US, not just for

18:01

meta, but for all the social media platforms.

18:03

And it's about how we receive our information.

18:06

The drug testing idea in content

18:08

credentials are kind of interesting

18:10

models for this. But I think part of the

18:12

issue is it's like the wave, right? It's the wave

18:14

of content that's going to happen and it's

18:17

and it's completely uncontrollable, which

18:19

is, of course, one of the things we like about the internet. It

18:21

happens at great speed. But it does

18:23

mean when you do find these issues

18:26

around fake news or AI generated imagery,

18:29

you're sort of staring at a fire hose going, I wonder

18:31

if I could put you through a colander? Like, you know me,

18:34

like, is there is there are there models out there that

18:36

you've seen or heard of that might actually be able to navigate

18:38

a problem of this scale?

18:41

Oh, I would guess so. Analog.

18:43

And I would just say it's critical thinking is

18:46

the main thing. If you're really

18:48

going to address the wave, I think

18:50

is like the responsibility has to kind

18:52

of end up being on the person, not

18:55

necessarily the publishing platform. I

18:57

don't

18:57

know if I really think that surely it's I

19:00

think in reasonable terms, you need a combination.

19:02

You need there to be some you can't

19:04

let push all the responsibility on the user.

19:06

But I don't I also think we should

19:09

get smarter. Yeah. But at the same

19:11

time, companies must have a role as well. Yeah. And the truth

19:13

is, these companies are all have huge teams

19:15

of content moderation people. They have the

19:17

Twitter. Twitter

19:20

doesn't have a huge. It's not a burning room. Yeah.

19:22

So they have huge teams of content moderation people.

19:24

They have algorithms that are working on

19:26

stuff, you know, very sophisticated algorithms, particularly

19:28

on video stuff at YouTube and

19:31

Twitch and other video platforms so they can

19:33

assess content or videos because that's obviously

19:35

particularly precarious for online safety.

19:38

So this is happening at

19:40

scale at tech companies. They know they have

19:42

some kind of responsibility. It's unclear how much

19:44

we expect it to be them and how much we expect it to be users.

19:47

And I think probably with and I'm hesitant

19:49

to say this, given what I know we're going to talk about next,

19:52

but I actually has a role to play

19:54

here on veracity checking if you've

19:57

got software that understands what's

19:59

out there on the internet. and you know, can

20:01

kind of reason a little bit, then it can help

20:04

sort of at scale understand whether things

20:06

are just totally made up or whether they're built on

20:08

credible sources, etc. Yeah,

20:10

and I should, I'm sort of at pains

20:13

to point out that AI is not a monolithic

20:15

technology. What we're talking about is

20:17

a suite of technologies that can be both part

20:19

of not the problem, the

20:21

problems and also part of the

20:23

solutions, right? And I think

20:26

it may be pushing

20:29

everything into a singular like AI good,

20:31

AI bad is not necessarily the most

20:33

constructive way of executing this. That

20:35

balancing act between how much of this

20:37

is a responsibility of tech companies, and

20:40

I suppose government and us as

20:43

internet users, is

20:45

there a good version of that balance that you

20:48

see is attainable or at least something

20:50

to aim for? Yeah,

20:52

one factor that I would put out there is if you think

20:55

it's on the users to make critical assessments,

20:57

or at least you think part of it's on users to look at

20:59

stuff and make use their critical thinking to

21:01

make an assessment about veracity, you need to help them

21:04

have the information to make that call. Ah,

21:06

that's interesting. Which is part of what

21:08

the like labeling, you know, well, this isn't

21:11

backed up by, you know, credible sources

21:13

or check this fact, you know, sort of like...

21:16

Do

21:16

you think that there is like a huge

21:18

shift in like skepticism

21:21

of stuff on the web now because

21:23

of all this? Do you think that's like this major cultural

21:26

shift that we have like kind of across the

21:28

generations even where younger

21:30

people who are so digitally native, completely

21:33

technically fluent,

21:35

can sort of say, well, if it's a picture on the web,

21:37

I'm going to assume that a machine has touched

21:39

this at some point? Yeah,

21:42

I hope so. But I don't necessarily think that's

21:44

ubiquitous. There are groups

21:47

of people for whom that they

21:49

have more of that kind of filter

21:53

and groups of people for whom they've basically had less on, you

21:55

know, you've seen the rise of lots of conspiracy theorist

21:57

movements and the QAnon. stuff

22:00

and all the rest of it where they're

22:02

almost exaggerated by a lack

22:05

of engaging critically with whatever

22:07

you're seeing. I do wonder

22:09

that lack of trust that you're identifying how it changes us

22:12

and how it changes the way we interact with each other.

22:14

I mean that on a human level. I

22:17

don't feel good about that future. Yeah,

22:20

I mean how we interact with each other on a human level.

22:23

If I saw the guy or heard him say

22:26

it or her say it,

22:28

then I'm going to be skeptical of this whatever.

22:30

You know, I mean, you can sort of extrapolate

22:32

this out into the role of the media in

22:35

this as fact

22:37

checkers of information and whether

22:40

or not like what you can trust as

22:42

a source of truth. I think

22:44

the practitioner of being a reporter

22:46

or something that is changing like the

22:48

skills themselves are changing, but it's almost

22:50

like the need for them to exist

22:53

to do the checking on behalf of an audience

22:56

or the masses like that's picking

22:58

up. So if there's any like grade 12

23:00

students, come be a janitor. Yeah, please do. Just

23:03

to add to that point, I think one of the things that's been

23:05

really clear in the sort of changing land, hugely

23:07

changing landscape of the media globally

23:09

over the last 20 years with

23:12

the internet has been first a fracturing, but then

23:14

a real coalescence around really

23:16

valuable brands that have built

23:18

a lot of trust. And so if you see a

23:20

video on the New York Times or in The Economist or something,

23:23

you're going to believe it. Whereas if you see

23:25

it floating around on Twitter or on meta,

23:27

you might have a critical filter that

23:30

you apply to it about whether it's real or not. And

23:32

that's actually quite valuable for high quality

23:34

journalism, I think, in a way that then brings

23:37

back some of that cachet into the industry.

23:39

Just staying on the topic of AI, just

23:42

almost to look at it from another angle, an interesting story

23:45

in the last couple of days that KPMG has

23:47

lodged a complaint after AI generated material

23:49

was used to implicate them in non-existent

23:52

scandals.

23:53

I don't...

23:55

Just walk me through this one, Jess, because this one's actually

23:57

quite complex.

23:58

This is my favourite story. of this week,

24:01

a group of academics have put forward a submission

24:03

into a Senate inquiry that details

24:07

all of these bad things that KPMG is

24:09

said to have done. But it turns out that their submission

24:12

was AI generated and none of these case

24:14

studies ever happened at all. And now KPMG

24:17

is up in arms because it has been

24:19

misrepresented by a group of academics

24:22

who are professional thinkers

24:25

who used AI

24:26

and it spat out a bunch of lies. How

24:30

did this happen Alex? Seriously,

24:33

how? This is pretty tough, isn't it? I mean, I

24:35

don't want to go easy on the big four, but

24:38

you shouldn't as KPMG or anyone else

24:40

have to siphon through parliamentary

24:42

materials for fake news that's been

24:45

submitted by academic credible academics

24:47

outlining, you know, misconduct that you just

24:50

weren't involved in. I suspect

24:52

it's just teething around how

24:54

people use AI for important and serious

24:57

stuff. Ironically, one of the co-authors

24:59

who wasn't responsible for using AI

25:01

in this case, one of the co-authors on the submission had recently

25:05

published a paper about the dangers of using AI

25:07

in academic research, which

25:09

is just the icing on the cake for this story.

25:12

But anyone who's used AI in a professional context

25:15

or who has thought about ways that they might be able to use

25:17

it probably thought, well, you know,

25:19

it's going to have to be the computer plus human to

25:21

make it my work, not just something that's hooked up on

25:23

the, you know, by an artificial intelligence. So

25:26

did they just use AI

25:29

to trawl together a bunch

25:31

of stories around like scandals

25:33

to kind of add in the middle of a submission?

25:36

Is that because I'm thinking about how it would have happened,

25:38

right?

25:39

I think they asked chat GPT

25:41

and I don't know this.

25:42

I think it was Bard. Oh, sorry. Yeah.

25:45

They've asked Bard

25:47

when has an accounting

25:49

firm like KPMG come a cropper

25:52

in some way. And it spat out some

25:54

like case studies and no one's checked.

25:57

Like this is the this is this is the

25:59

human.

25:59

error part of this

26:00

whole story is no one checked. That

26:04

gives me nightmares. Every

26:07

time someone

26:07

tells me anecdotally in

26:09

an interview in the course of my work,

26:12

I am Googling whether or not that was an actual

26:14

thing. For the academics

26:17

not to have done that is just

26:19

like you said, I'm not here to stick up for KPMG

26:21

or any of these firms,

26:22

but you've

26:25

got to fact check your stuff. Is

26:27

it worth saying that there's totally room

26:29

here for this to identify something that's really clear

26:32

about what's happening with AI right now that needs fixing? The

26:34

company or person that comes up with a solution

26:37

to this part of

26:39

this bit of work that I've produced for you is questionable.

26:41

You should go and check this or a confidence

26:43

score as you work your way through a piece of work

26:45

that ChatJPT or Bata has produced where it's

26:47

like this is really, really true and this stuff

26:49

is a bit less true and this stuff we just made this up. A

26:53

self-assessment by AI of its own

26:55

work and its veracity based on it, it's got access

26:57

to lots of information. Presumably at some

27:00

point it knows which bits are not

27:02

linkable, which you couldn't go and find

27:04

on a Google search and which you could. Yeah, you could

27:06

have that as a heat map or something. Exactly. I

27:09

just like annotations. The

27:12

issue I find with it when I have

27:14

asked it for information and it comes

27:16

back to the information that I know to be wrong, I

27:19

come back with, well, where did you find that? Where

27:21

did you get that from? I feel like I never

27:23

get an answer from ChatJPT or Bata

27:25

or any of the rest of them. I think this should

27:27

be at least a function in there to almost self-annotate.

27:30

I got this from Bla. That would make it a

27:33

much more useful tool. That's part

27:35

of the black box thing though, isn't it? Oh, sure.

27:37

Then it would be Google. Then it's a system. Well,

27:40

but the people who built the AI don't know where it got

27:42

it from. There's no path to trace some of

27:44

the reasoning. That's what

27:48

neural networks often do is they put out results that you

27:50

can't actually necessarily draw a line

27:52

back through to the original source. That's

27:56

one of the scary bits about self-learning AI and

27:58

the new AI. new stuff. No

28:01

doubt there'll be more of this to talk about in the coming

28:03

weeks but for now we are out of time.

28:05

Huge thank you to our guest this week, Alex

28:07

McCauley from the Tech Council. Thank you so much for being here.

28:10

Thanks very much for having me Mark. And Jessica Sire from the

28:12

Australian Financial Review. See you

28:14

later. And with that I shall leave

28:16

you. My name is Mark Fennell and thank you for listening

28:18

to another episode of Download Vision.

28:29

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