Robot dogs, tech bros and virtual Geisha girls: when SXSW came to Sydney
A simultaneously familiar and slightly terrifying robot dog wanders through the audience of a session at the Sydney edition of South by South West. On stage, the panellists opine about a future increasingly defined by artificial intelligence and automation.
“It’s going to get much, much more significant,” says Ed Santow, the former human rights commissioner and current director of policy and governance at the UTS Human Technology Institute. “And for many people that will be a good thing, [but] for a lot of people it’ll be really, really hard.”
AI has become ubiquitous in the past year, and at an event like SXSW it’s inescapable, but not everyone is convinced it’s a game-changer.
Charlie Brooker, the creator of the Netflix series Black Mirror who is at least partially responsible for making robot dogs so terrifying, says he found AI “boring and derivative” when he asked ChatGPT to write an episode of the hit show about technology gone wrong.
“It’s just emulating something. It’s Hoovered up every description of every Black Mirror episode, presumably from Wikipedia and other things that people have written, and it’s just sort of vomiting that back at me. It’s pretending to be something it isn’t capable of being,” he tells the audience.
Outside the main convention centre in Tumbalong Park where the free events are set up, a pop-up bar claims to be designed by AI, right down to an “AI cocktail” – but it’s just a margarita. You can’t help but think, maybe Brooker is right.
Our regulatory system is ‘inadequate’
Depending on which event you attend, AI is either the latest capitalist fad, a looming horror, something we need to embrace or not even worth thinking about.
At a panel on the ethical use of AI, Kate Bower, a consumer data advocate at Choice, says because AI is invisible in everyday services such as search engines and credit services, people are at risk from AI without realising it.
“People don’t know when they’re potentially being harmed by AI,” she says. “And that could be through lack of inclusion, it could be through lack of diversity, it could be by opaque credit scores that mean that they don’t get a mortgage.”
“They might not know there’s discrimination in that algorithm, so those options for redress that we currently have in our regulatory system are inadequate.”
Justin Stevens, the director of news at the ABC, says he is excited about the prospect of AI but admits the public broadcaster has been taking a very cautious approach, making sure it isn’t used to generate original pieces of journalism.
It could be useful for investigative journalism, he says, by scraping court records and collecting data in a matter of minutes where it otherwise would have taken weeks. AI tools to identify AI deep-fakes could also be of benefit in the future.
“We don’t know and can’t see the