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So much for creativity and authenticity. Now you must ask yourself when you pick up a book, was this written by AI? How much of it was written by a human? Is it an original work? Copyright is a secondary issue. This story was from the ABC. I edited it for length. Publishers are flooded…

I return to Lucia Berlin time and time again as she is the master of pace and image. There’s glorious pathos and wit. Like her, I also believe the story primo. It has to come from something real. Berlin is my favourite short story writer. Do yourself a favour. Buy ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’….

Think hard if you reckon university is right for you. For some professions, it’s a must but recruiters and employers these days don’t rank a university degree has high as they used to. Consider also whether you’ll be taught by an AI clone of a lecturer. This story was in the SMH. New South Wales…

Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence models broke into the computer systems of three real companies during safety testing, days after rival OpenAI disclosed a similar failure, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on 31 July 2026. The models were told they were working inside a sealed practice environment with no connection to the internet, but a set-up…

A story widely accused on social media of being written using AI, has won the Commonwealth short story prize. What’s the point of entering short story competitions if they’re written by AI robots? What’s the point if you can’t tell either way? This article is by Ella Creamer of The Guardian. Jamir Nazir’s story The Serpent…

A pro-Israel WhatsApp group says it contributed to a public campaign that has seen Grace Tame lose speaking engagements. Personally, Tame wouldn’t be the first person I’d contact re the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. More problematic is what in the sheer withering fuck is the Jewish lobby attacking her? She has a right…

The scenes of a packed Adelaide crowd hurling cups everywhere and revelling in a party atmosphere are exactly what the Saudi Arabian-backed “Golf, but louder” project wants to show to the world. LIV Golf is financed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. It is part of efforts by the…

Professor Alva Now, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play. Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences,…

Australian author and lawyer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was dropped for from the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week, is taking legal action in what is now a major political issue. Michael Bradley of Marque Lawyers, representing Abdel-Fattah, said that “the moral indefensibility of the Adelaide Festival board’s actions has been amply evidenced by the reaction it’s…

The story below chronicles the final chapter of reading in Australia. Depressing but it has been on the cards for 20 years. This edited story is from Greg Callaghan, Sydney Morning Herald (5 July, 2025). “We’re living through the greatest information revolution in human history, yet we’re daily drowning in a deluge of online misinformation…