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Hello and welcome to Screenshot, your weekly tech update from national technology reporter Ange Lavoipierre, featuring the best, worst and strangest in tech and online news. Read to the end for 260 chicken nuggets you never asked for.
Not everyone's on board with a social media age limit
Ancient texts have long promised we will receive several significant clues, other than the now-plentiful vibes, that doomsday is approaching.
For example, the stars shall be thrown down to earth. Tick! Also, apparently all sea animals shall "gather on the surface", "bellow unintelligibly" and "subsequently be turned into a chatbot". Another tick!
A lesser known but no less meaningful omen is that the Australian government, opposition and eSafety Commissioner "shall all simultaneously agree when it comes to child safety on social media".
The good news for humanity is that we're still at least one short on the omens front, although it was a close call.
The government and the opposition, not known for publicly agreeing, have both committed to a social media ban for Australians under the age of 16.
The Coalition has vowed to legislate the change within 100 days of taking office, if it wins the election.
Labor has been a little more circumspect, but a few days later Anthony Albanese essentially said he would do the same, assuming it's achievable (and there is some doubt on that front).
The eSafety Commissioner, on the other hand, has expressed serious doubts about the policy.
On the very first day of public hearings for the much-vaunted Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, Commissioner Julie Inman Grant compared banning children younger than 16 from social media to banning them from the ocean.
"Cast your mind back to summer and transport yourself to one of your favourite beach experiences," she told the room full of vitamin D-deficient public servants, kicking off a short but impactful guided meditation.
"The sand is warm under your feet, and you can hear the joyful sounds of children excitedly frolicking in the water.
"Thankfully, they instinctively know that they need to swim between the flags.
"We don't fence the ocean or keep children entirely out of the water … but we do create protected swimming environments."
Inman Grant also explained her reservations in a written submission to the inquiry.
It warns that the debate around a complete ban for under-16s, enforced by age verification technology, contains a misconception that "social media is a discrete form of media that can be separated from the rest of the internet".
Given social media is not a hermetically sealed single unit, the regulator is worried that if faced with a ban, kids will just access social media in secret.
Such a policy risks pushing them towards "less regulated, non-mainstream services" with more plentiful harms, the submission read — referring maybe to the likes of Gab, Truth Social, 4Chan and a broader class of platforms known as "alt-social media".
Then if a child does need help, it might be all the harder for them to find it.
"Restriction-based approaches can also reduce young people's confidence or inclination to reach out to a trusted adult [leading to] greater long-term negative impacts," the submission read.
The Commissioner also makes the point that even if the ban did work as intended, keeping kids off social media until their 16th birthday will not prepare them for the online world.
Or to revisit the beach metaphor, swimming when you're older doesn't make you much safer if you haven't had any swimming lessons.
On top of all that, she argued that bans "place the onus on children to keep themselves safe, rather than putting the onus on online platforms", which wasn't the stated goal for either of the major parties.
That's the thing about setting up an independent regulator — they will occasionally disagree with you in public.
But with recent polls showing two-thirds of Australians support a ban, it may not change the politics of the issue.
OpenAI's Mira Murati says certain creative jobs shouldn't have existed
A senior executive at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been a little too honest about the impact AI is likely to have on jobs.
"Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality," said chief technical officer Mira Murati during a talk at a technical university in New Hampshire.
The first part of the sentence, that some creative jobs (among others) will "go away", whilst brutal, is not exactly breaking news.
But the follow-up remark, that they shouldn't have existed in the first place, is insensitive at best and indicative of a scary attitude at worst.
"The first step is to actually help people understand what the systems are capable of … integrate them in their workflows, and then start predicting and forecasting the impact," Murati said.
In other words, put AI into workplaces and then start working out what it'll do to people — a pretty neat match for the "move fast break things" motto we've always known Silicon Valley for.
Not all the creative jobs will go quietly, though.
Three of the world's biggest record labels have launched a fresh lawsuit against AI startups Suno and Udio, alleging copyright infringement on an "almost unimaginable scale".
LoadingMcDonalds' AI drive-thru sent back to the kitchen
In contrast, there's one AI that's giving jobs back to humans.
McDonalds has been using AI to take drive-thru orders at more than 100 of its US restaurants in recent years, in partnership with IBM.
In a recent email to staff, it reportedly announced an end to the program, but has not ruled out similar forays with a different AI company in the future.
Swings and roundabouts, though. You may not have wanted 260 chicken nuggets, but you can't tell me you didn't want this content, or this.
And if it's all too much …
Then I'm not sure this will help, but it's nevertheless good to know that there's a Subreddit devoted to cataloguing the world's oddly sinister stock photos.
Whichever creative jobs Mira Murati was referring to when she said some should never have existed, I'm positive she didn't mean this.
Recommendations and tips are always welcome. You can reach me securely via Proton Mail.