Show me the money, tech bro

 It's no compliment to know your book has been used to train an AI machine. It feels dismaying, infuriating and gut wrenching.

 'My book has been dismantled, broken up for parts and sold to a wrecking yard.'

'It feels like someone has broken into my house and stolen my stuff.'

'Fucking livid!' 

'Why bother creating anything, if these guys are just gonna steal it for dollars and get away with it?'

'I wanted to vomit when I found out.' 

These are very real responses from Australian authors, as Meta scrapes our books and songs to train their AI Llama3. In January, the world was alerted to Meta's use of pirated copies of books and academic papers. Not long after, The Atlantic published a search option where you could check if your book, song, artwork or academic paper had been scraped by Meta. It's here. One of my books is in there. Fucking Facebook, just like Google, are still being evil.

So ... this week in Australia, the Productivity Commission released a report on 'unlocking the benefits of AI' and suggested that we exclude the Copyright Act for fair dealing with AI companies. 'Fair dealing' means sacrificing our books and songs to the machines. There has been an uproar from creative workers because our government is basically giving a license to mega rich AI companies to steal our books, songs and art without paying us a cent in royalties.

I've had many philosophical conversations recently with artists, writers and academics. We are entering a new age where some creatives are using AI to make really interesting work and others are being pummeled by Copilot's idiotic suggestions and bad memes, while Google's dodgey AI just makes shit up:

(I managed to track down the 'source' of this lie to a 2023 Classics conference where someone gave a paper on Jane Austen, claiming that she considered Wollstonecraft as literary parentage. So, for Google's AI it therefore follows that Wollstonecraft is actually Austen's biological mother.) When accused of lying, the chat bot will come back with the grovelling apology of a problematic drinker. Promises to do better follow.

I teach in areas of English Literature and History. Call me a Luddite but I will die on the hill of arguing that to write an essay or short story is to think through a problem. It is not about getting high distinctions for typing an elegant prompt to ChatGPT. It's about writing through a problem. Mary Wollstonecraft  thought through a problem when she wrote A Vindication for the Rights of Women. Descartes thought through a problem and came up with I think, therefore I am. Both of these thinkers did not need Meta or Copilot to nut out their argument in 2 seconds. Slow work is where great creative breakthroughs happen.

What is happening now feels like a dilution of our brains and our language and it comes at the expense of critical thinking and people who create art, music and literature.

There is hope though, at least in this nook of the woods. Maybe work written by humans will soon be worth more than AI slop. At the moment we are being fleeced by out of control tech billionaires who buy governments and dictate international policy. It's a terrible analogy ... but like free-range, hormone-free chicken, perhaps the product of careful work and thinking can win out in this situation and be worth more.

 The Australian Productivity Commission has proposed to allow big tech companies access to copyrighted Australian content to build their artificial intelligence platforms without compensating creators, like this is a good idea to sell out our national cultural canon! At the moment there are class actions by authors in the US against Meta illegally scraping their books. In Australia, there are no laws yet to prevent this kind of behaviour and the Productivity Commission appears to think it is all cool. So ... crickets.

Liz and the Tingles

The generator is whirring outside tonight. I say whirring, maybe it is thumping. Anyway, the generator is a presence, a petrol-induced entity who keeps the lights and internet on. My batteries connected to the solar panels are giving me ambivalent signals right now. Living off grid is a constant mind-state of thinking about power sources.

Last week a young woman contacted me. 'Hi Sarah, I'd like to interview you about your part in the Women's Work project. Could we set up a time for me to film you talking about this project?' 

As always, I was driving between towns. Someone once told me I have a house in Gemini, which means I live in two houses and this is so true. I replied, stuck in road works world between two towns, 'Coming into town. Can we meet at Lawley Park?'

There were several vehicles at Lawley Park when I turned up. It was lunch time, so some council workers stretched by their truck, a stray Winnebago lurched between the big colonial trees and there was that guy in a lime green Holden commodore. The driver of a crimson people mover looked like she just needed to get away from her kids.

Rachel from the television news network got out of her white SUV and started setting up tripods, checking her camera and testing the audio. From my old lady point of view, she looked like she was about 11 but she was actually a pretty competent woman in her 20s. She interviewed me for about fifteen minutes, went back to work, did the editing and production work herself and her story was on the news by 5.30 pm.

I'm bringing up this scene because I have spent several months creating a simple audio visual story to contribute to the Women in Media, Wimmin's Work project. The State Library asked me to contribute a story and I was like, 'Of course, yes! I can do audio work.'  (ummm). After months of quite intense sessions on my own with head phones and still learning the lingo, I came up with this:

I mean - it took me months! And Rachel from Channel 7 did much the same thing in about three hours. I'm now in awe of people who can put together a story so fast. Anyway ... enjoy my foray into AV. It's been a trip. If you would like to see other stories from the same project, go here: 

https://slwa.wa.gov.au/wimminswork

Valley of the Giants

This is a poem by Dorothy Hewett, an esteemed Western Australian poet with legendary status in these parts.

THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS

In the burnt-out trunk
in the karri forest
myself my little sister
hand in hand
one dark one fair
one bonnetted one
with a nimbus
of platinum hair
like lost children
out of a gothic tale
behind us his akubra hatted
head
sprouting unseen antlers
our father the wood demon
growing out of a tree
snapped up by a box brownie
the 60 year old negative
exposed like a parable
the dark father
the dark child
subdued and powerful
the blonde
in her white dress
blazing into the light
transitory
as a cabbage moth
alighting for an instant
in the forest

those judging figures
orchestrate the scene
rising out of the litter
on the forest floor
implacable as horned owls
the giant tree's fallen down
the children grown
the tragic rotting order overthrown. 

Last Day

 I think it was my last day on firetower today and it was kinda boring and long. Low visability, no smokes and the spotter planes returning early because the clouds were covering the south. Fires to the west had died down due to the rains.

At the same time, permit burns had opened to the north east and so we were supposed to look out for them!

On my morning climb, the snake has gone but there is a feral pig that snorts in the bush as I pass it by. It is digging up leaf litter along the pathway. At one stage of my climb, this pig has dug a ditch and rolled around in it. People think that Australian feral pigs are like gigantic razorbacks but they are actually smaller than your average kelpie ... little pigs. They are kinda cute but they can really mess with country.

I hear the pigs snorting in the mornings as I walk up the mountain, the crashes as they run away from me through the forest, and then see their workings on the pathway where they have rooted around the leaf litter for bugs and roots.

 So today, I climbed the mountain sans tiger snake, as the little pig jumped away from me into the forest. The clouds clung to the coast and I knew it was my last day on the tower for the season. The spotter pilot called balese on the weather coming in from the south. "Heading home to the north," she said.

 

We see some pretty amazing things when up in the firetower. Wedge tail eagles hunting, floating around, never flapping their wings, just tipping their wings to catch the updraft, sometimes a notch missing on their wings from a moulted feather, fighting the siblings in spectacular airborne dogfights.  Little brown birds on the summit. Peregrine falcons catching butterflies. An eagle with tree's twigs in its talons. Ink black skinks wriggling up to the tomato leftovers I throw out the window. A vertical rainbow. The light spearing through the clouds to highlight a certain paddock alone in the forest..The strangest insects I've ever seen.
 

 

Green beer and the tiger queen

 Happy St Patrick's Day folks!

 

Today, I climbed the mountain to the fire tower and got to the spot where a tiger snake lies basking every morning. It is always lying in the leaves against a massive wall of granite, just powering up with early sunlight. Every. Fucking.Day. Stretched out in the mornings, coiled in the afternoon, it is a resident who eyes me as I pass through ancient lace curtains.

'You can't see me, right? Look again!"

 

Despite my recent snake handling course, understanding the critters a bit better and a handy compression bandage in my backpack, I still stall at this point of the climb. If I had one of those watches, pretty sure I'd see my heart rate peaking out right about the moment I round the corner on the last bit of pathway before the stairs begin.

This morning, the tiger was nowhere to be seen. This was worrying, because I like to know where it is and not get taken by surprise. But it is St Patrick's Day after all.

Me: Hey, Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Let's get bent on green beer!

My snake mate: Yeah um. Maybe not today. 

Me: But it's so great. We'll do Irish dancing and ... 

My snake mate: yeah ... nah.

Me: Oh, oh man I'm so sorry. I forgot.

My snake mate: It's alright man. I love you right? But St Pats is never a good day for me. 

So today, we cautiously avoided each other, this human and this snake. Tonight I collected some gaiters from my Mum's place. Mum is all for preventative measures (super sensible!) and one of them, when I expressed my worries about this particular tiger snake, was "get some gaiters so you feel better about climbing the mountain."

 

 

Johnny Walker's Sausage Roll and the Fledgling

There's a man we call Johnny Walker because he walks the highway everyday into the little town. He swings his arms as he walks, always dressed the same; dark clothing, a backpack and peaked cap. He lives in the forest some where only he knows, ten kilometres or so from the shops. His living in a tent in an unknown location tends to stress the authorities out a bit but the general consensus is that he is better off here than on the streets of Perth.

It was a weird day in the fire tower yesterday. Smoke from the bushfires stymied any chance of me spotting a new one. Once the southerly came in and cleared some of the smoke, low cloud descended and I could only see for about twenty kilometres. A long, frustrating day!

As the sun slid down, I went into town for supplies and saw John, striding towards me, waving me down. We always stop to have a chat, quick snippets of life, how we are feeling today. John doesn't do eye contact but once that is comfortably established, he is a great conversationalist.

'Hey lovely Sarah!' John said. 'Would you like a sausage roll? Got a heap half price from the servo.' He brandished a few brown paper bags at me.

'It's a long way to the top, John, so yes please,' I said and he handed me a bag with a sausage roll and a bonus cheddar kranski.

On the Broke track, the long gravel road through the karri forests to my home, I was again stymied. (Yes, it's a stymie kinda day and also I like that word. It's almost onomatopoeic.Try saying it slowly, out loud.)

 Karri trees drop their enormous limbs without warning, often when warm weather suddenly cools and the resins in their joints contract. This one happened probably only an hour or so before I got there. The scene was a mess, from twigs and leaves to logs half a metre wide. It was six o'clock. Long day and all I wanted to do was get home.

What beekeepers call the 'karri flow' is on at the moment. It's a phenomena that happens every seven or eight years. The trees burst into bloom and the smell is amazing, like the air is laden with honey and memory. Normally you can't see the flowers because they are sixty metres above us but as I started pulling away branches, the source of that scent became obvious. One more leafy and perfumed branch later, I uncovered a crime scene: Three fluffy chicks lay scattered about what was once their roost.

 

By then, I'd already been on the phone to my boss about the tree. It is a fire road after all and crew are using it every day when heading out to the bush fire. Plus, yeah, I just wanted to get home and I couldn't move those logs myself. The problem was that it was six thirty on a Friday afternoon and all the shire roads mob were going into relaxation or limp mode. It seemed intractable.

'But I have chicks!' I said on the phone and like a movie, the three chicks began to recover from their momentous fall and start chirping and moving about. 'Oh my God, they are alive!'

 

'Okay, keep them warm and when you get home, give them some sugar water,' my boss said. So ... how do I get home with a recalcitrant karri limb playing door bitch? Boss pulled some strings and an hour later, headlights threaded through the trees as one of the fire crew  on stand by turned up with a chainsaw and towing chain.

It was quite dark by the time we'd finished piling the branches onto the sides of the road. I beckoned the fire fighter over to the tail lights of his truck. 'Check this out,' I said, holding the brown paper bag.

'It's a ... sausage roll?' He asked, peering into the bag. 'What am I looking at? A sausage roll?'

'Look closer, there's three little chicks in there.'

He did and said, 'Wow! Where did you find them?' When I showed him the spot where these fledglings had fallen to earth, he said, 'Good spot! I guess sausage rolls are not part of their normal diet. Mixing it up a bit are you?'

'Boss told me to keep them warm. This *on special and then donated* sausage roll is still sort of warm, so I thought it might be a nice place for them.'

Two of the chicks died overnight. The violent crashing down of their home was just too much. But the third (the one in my hand) cheeped and moved about on the hot water bottle and gave out a tenacious 'I will survive' vibe. I fed it lemon barley cordial from a pipette and my dog hovered about, no doubt anxious about hierarchical matters.

Today, I was rained off the tower which was quite excellent, given the bushfires, and drove seventy kilometres to meet a wild bird carer. We met in the car park of a roadhouse and I handed over the tiny featherless chick to her. 'It's pooing! That's a good sign,' she said. The last I've heard is that the little trauma baby had a good feed and is going well.

So, next time I see Johnny Walker, I'll tell him that he did good by giving me that brown paper bag with the warmish sausage roll inside. It may well have saved a life.

PS ate the kranski 

 

Night Shift

There is a massive bush fire prowling around the forests about 20 kilometres to the west of me. Every day, conditions change according to the wind direction or rain. Large tracts of karri, marri and jarrah country are in the conflagration and occasionally, while on tower, I'll see some black smoke go up, which usually means tea tree or some other kind of melaluca. I can smell the track of the fire in the smoke, as it moves through grass trees, karri forests and peat swamps. Fragrant, warm, dusty, acrid.

All roads into the area have been closed and Fire and Emergency Services have ordered traffic control people to block the roads with their cars.Traffic control do twelve hour shifts from 5 to 5, sitting in their cars all night or all day. The night before last, a traffic control crew were evacuated from the fire ground when the wind changed.

This whole experience has changed my thinking about traffic control: they are pretty much first responders but in a boring sense. Sitting in a car for twelve hours. No internet or phone range. Nothing to do but deter randoms from the fire ground.

This is a photo from one of those guys who saw the moon emerge from the clouds, with the lights from his truck illuminating the foreground.

Photo by Beer Garden Philosopher