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5 hours ago
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I have a cherished memory of a family trip to the movies. In the Australian tradition, we bought choc-top ice-creams, chattered through pre-show trailers and a hush fell on the full house as the movie started.
It was Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, on film, only a couple of weeks ago, months after its release.
In an AI-supercharged world of algorithmic recommendations and atomised cultural space, I’ve come to suspect The Odyssey’s ongoing popular appeal is no longer its Greeks with gifts, or superstar director.
It’s the increasingly rare opportunity to share even a single cultural reference with other people. Despite our human instinct for interaction, we live in a global moment where health authorities believe social isolation is an epidemic.
Yet in the same city of my fun night at the cinema, this week it was news that Australia’s Macquarie University has introduced an AI chatbot into the weekly teaching of two mandatory psychology subjects.
Displacing human beings from what should be stable jobs isn’t the only outrage here.
As someone whose dainty, addled, depressive brain obliges tender care from trained professionals, Macquarie, please record this data in your feedback corpus: I cannot trust or validate the insight of a supposed expert whose contact with adult realities has been compromised by being taught by a machine.
If I want a chatbot to talk me out of a panic spiral, I’ll consult it within my already-paid-for subscription service when I’m freaking out at midnight like a normal person, thank you.
Far more positive social impacts can be measured from Australia’s academics’ union, this week taking strike action at the University of Sydney against the encroach of AI madness.
“We want enforceable protections against AI being used to cut jobs, intensify workloads, undermine academic and professional judgement, or replace work and human interaction that are fundamental to a university,” said the NTEU’s Vince Caughley.
Solidarity, brother. My gratitude extends to Australia’s writers’ union, the AWG, as well as its entertainment and communications union, the US actors’ union and Writers Guild of America, Canada’s performance union, Germany’s service workers union and actors’ union, an alliance of Italy’s dubbing unions and all industrial organisations striking AI-use agreements not merely to protect their members’ workplace rights, but to remain on the side of public opinion.
Because studies repeatedly suggest consumers don’t want the isolating, automated outputs being sold to them.
In the world of commercial literature, one study found “consumers perceived human-written books more positively in all investigated dimensions than ones written by AI”. While other researchers have found the intrusion of AI titles to Amazon is now as many as 20% of its ebook catalogue, the same study shows they only made up 12% of sales and 10% of bestsellers in their genre. A considerable underperformance.
In music, global consultancy Bain learned that 62% of consumers would not engage with music generated by AI.
French streaming service Deezer revealed fully AI-generated music constituted as much as 18% of its daily uploads but amounted only to about 0.5% of listening – while the Guardian reported that up to 70% of those streams appeared fraudulent.
Bain found the only majority tolerance for AI content was in video games: 71%did not want AI in their books, and 65% did not want it in their news and magazines.
Similarly, in sales, studies show that telling customers beforehand they are engaging with chatbots in outbound calls reduces purchase rates by 79.7%. In 2025, Deloitte learned 74% of customers preferred human interaction even for routine banking questions. In another international 2025 study, chatbots were the least popular form of customer service engagement: a mere 8% of respondents chose them voluntarily.
Consumer sentiment backlash is registering faster than the slow pace of democratic governance. Governments have struggled with the speed of tech encroach, with regulation lagging in the face of relentless economic and political pressure from the world’s most aggressively overcapitalised, cashed-up dipshits who own all this stuff. Australia is considering its approaches to AI regulation, but it does not have it yet.
Friends, we missed the boat on regulating social media. Nazis, radicalisation, deadly health misinformation and addictive and dangerous products sailed in.
As more comprehensive AI regulation is debated, the Australian government is mooting community calls for default opt-in obligations on platform algorithms, to stop the use of apps being conditional on what preferred form of slop its tech lord wants to shove into your consciousness.
We should all support it, if just to take a wild, political stand for authentic preference over forced consumption. Elon Musk has mooted making an “AI Odyssey”, and if you think the algorithm he paid $44bn for will let you escape that horror show, there are some relevant scenes from A Clockwork Orange I suggest you try to catch at a midnight screening.
Cinema, writing, education, psychology and, yes, even shopping and banking facilitate human interactions.
Unless the clients of AI’s robots are also robots, I have to ask: just who are y’all making products for?
