Boquet?: Nationals Senator Ross Cadell’s mini-essays on the various gifts he’s received can be hard to keep up with, such is the frequency with which he discloses literally everything. However, one garrulous addition caught our eye.
On February 6, Cadell noted he’d received, courtesy of Israeli ambassador to Australia Amir Maimon, a “fascinating rose keychain featuring a decorative pendant with a red gemstone in the centre of the flower”. The gift was handmade by “Rockets Into Roses”, an Israeli company that repurposes the remains of a “Palestinian rocket that was fired at Sderot and other Israeli communities during the Gaza war”.
As Cadell wrote: “‘Rockets into Roses’ literally transform instruments of death & weapons of war into objects of great beauty and meaning, representing love, growth, and great hope for a peaceful future. They are modern day versions of ‘swords beaten into plowshares’.”
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Great, Scott: Scott Morrison, now the vice chairman of American Global Strategies, has written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing that US President Donald Trump should establish a third “pillar” under the AUKUS pact focused on space technology, so alliance partners can compete in one of the important geopolitical theatres of the future.
Don’t have a WSJ subscription? You might have read the op-ed via your subscription to The Australian, which has a commercial partnership with WSJ. Not that this was necessary in this case. The Oz assigned a reporter to write a story about the op-ed, marked “exclusive”, even though Morrison’s opinion piece had already been online for three hours.
The story could not have taken long to write. Out of its 643 words, 486 were lifted directly from Morrison’s op-ed. That’s 75%. Luckily the risk of a copyright infringement suit is low.
So how did Morrison’s op-ed perform on the WSJ site? Judging from the comments, it hasn’t made much of a splash yet. At the time of writing, the past 10 opinion pieces had an average of 225 comments each. The top piece, an editorial about the Iran situation, had a whopping 1,010 comments.
Morrison’s had 19 as of this morning, one of which was: “4 comments in 9 hours. Not a lot of interest in what ex Aussie prime minister has to say.”
What is even happening anymore: In the latest instalment of How On Earth Is This Real Life Dear God What, this morning Donald Trump, referring presumably to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ted Cruz, remarked that he asked Carlson if he was okay with Iran having nuclear weapons.
“He sort of didn’t like that,” Trump said. “And I said, ‘Well if it’s okay with you, then you and I do have a difference,’ but it’s really not okay with him.”
The president then continued by saying, “There’s no way you can let Iran have a nuclear weapon because the entire world will blow up.”
The odd part of this ad-lib commentary on America’s potential looming war with a foreign nation? Players from Italy’s Juventus football team standing behind the US president the entire time.
Tim’s Price: Benjamin Clark’s recent examination of Tim Wilson’s LinkedIn profile pointed out a curious but minor detail in his bio — who on earth called Wilson “one of the most ’eminent political strategists of their political generation’”?
After the piece was published, Wilson made a small tweak to his profile, attributing the quote to none other than Sydney Morning Herald columnist Jenna Price.
Everybody say hello to Tim! (Or at least the person on his team who’s been tasked with tracking his Crikey mentions.)
AI can’t get no satisfaction: One of the biggest stories in education is how AI bots like ChatGPT are wreaking havoc on the industry. Students have flocked to use the tools to cheat on their work. Teachers are being robot-authored essays that waste their time and sap their belief that they can actually help their students.
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For the AI sector, however, this is an opportunity. A cottage industry of edutech companies has popped up promising to help both teachers and students (which, if adopted widely, would create a dystopian ouroboros of AI marking AI-written essays).
One such company is Australia’s “Jeddle”, which has launched a new tool, JeddAi, which offers “24/7 access to a team of real-life expert markets and teacher-trained AI tools so you can get instant feedback on your work.”
The company claims “98% student satisfaction” and lists several testimonials on its website. But Crikey couldn’t help but notice something a bit off: the photographs of supposedly happy student customers like “Avantika” and “Luke” were stock images used elsewhere on the internet. As in, these were fake people.
We asked Jeddle why it used images of non-customers and whether the glowing testimonials were also fake (it’s possible it just wanted a face to put to the name), but heard no response. Why didn’t it just use the plethora of tools available to create new AI-generated faces?