Rant on Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison

Our hydro deserves better than a chatbot

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, the Tasmanian Greens announced they’ll move for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the AI data centres going up across the north of the state. I think this is a very good idea. These projects appear to have been approved without any specific regulations or parliamentary oversight, and the public has barely had the chance to have a say. The announcement also put a new number on the record: in Budget Estimates, under Greens questioning, Energy Minister Nick Duigan confirmed Firmus plans to draw 400 to 500 MW across two or three “AI factory” sites, which is more than Bell Bay Aluminium’s 335 MW, currently the state’s single biggest power user.

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for the details). ❤️

Update 14 December 2025: Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow, on 15 December 2025. In the mean time, it’s been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai, and others, thanks folks! I’ve received 100s of emails of support, and will reply to you all in time, thank you. Finger’s crossed Apple calls back.

Slop for the People

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Related: This article examines the Commonwealth’s AI governance failures in practice. For context on the newly announced federal AI Safety Institute, see Australia’s AI Safety Institute: Lessons from the UK and US. For state-level AI governance, see State of Play: How Australian States Are (Not) Governing AI.

The Australian Public Service’s (APS) official culture of AI adoption is not found in the glossy press releases of its ministers. But we’ll get to that shortly.

Australia's social media ban… A looming implementation disaster

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Australia’s world-first ban on social media for children under 16 takes effect in just over a month on December 10, 2025, yet nobody knows exactly how it will work.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 passed parliament in a rushed process in November last year, imposing potential fines of up to $50 million on platforms that fail to keep out underage users. While 77% of Australians support the ban, only 25% believe it will actually work, and with weeks until launch, the mounting controversies, technical failures, and expert warnings suggest it’s becoming exactly the shitshow sceptics predicted.

CommBank's AI boyfriend

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CBA has been naughty, and too reliant on their AI boyfriend. Here’s what happened:

A CBA customer contacted bank requesting contact details for Secretlab (a company that is not us, and makes chairs)
CBA staff member queried ChatGPT (possibly via their own personal, unauthenticated access to ChatGPT) to obtain phone number for Secretlab (chairs)
CBA staff disclosed the retrieved phone number to the requesting customer
The retrieved phone number is a number belonging to one of the directors of Secret Lab (a company that does not make chairs, and is us), a customer of CBA, and is used for our CBA account and our Director’s CBA account
Therefore, CBA disclosed customer personal information to another, unrelated customer, and trusted a third-party LLM (ChatGPT), accessed seemingly unauthenticated on the consumer ChatGPT platform, as a source for data to provide to another customer
During investigation, CBA staff replicated the same ChatGPT query process, seemingly on a personal phone, again unauthenticated, and on the consumer ChatGPT platform:

Signs indicate this might be routine practice amongst CBA staff

Oh, and they gave out the phone number for us, Secret Lab (not chairs), to someone looking for Secretlab’s (chairs) phone number. So, in the end of all this, they weren’t even helpful. LLMs in a nutshell, really.

We're all adults here

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The recent delisting of over 17,000 games from the independent platform Itch.io wasn’t a content moderation decision made by the platform itself. It was an act of financial coercion. Instigated by an Australian activist group and carried out by payment processors like Mastercard, it sets a dangerous precedent for all creative fields online.

The stated goal of the campaign was to combat media that glorifies sexual violence. An aim that sounds laudable, making it difficult to argue against in public. But like calls to age-gate social media, such goals can act as a Trojan horse. A socially acceptable pretext for gaining more information and control over people. And the outcome here reveals a profound and damaging overreach.

(Gradient) Descent into Mediocrity

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While the rest of the world loses its collective mind over artificial intelligence, Tasmania is sitting on an amazing competitive advantage… and might be about to throw it away by jumping on the AI bandwagon.

Everything that makes Tasmania economically successful is the exact opposite of what AI represents. And if Tasmanian businesses start chasing AI “efficiency” instead of leveraging their authentic advantages, they’ll transform from premium producers into generic commodity suppliers. Let’s start with the obvious: Tasmania didn’t build its reputation by being like everywhere else. The state that turned geographic isolation into "the quiet pursuit of the extraordinary" succeeded precisely because it rejected the bigger-faster-cheaper mentality that dominates global business. Brand Tasmania explicitly warns against becoming “beige and ordinary”, which is literally AI’s business model: statistical averaging toward the most probable (read: boring) output.

Don't use Wise

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it.

We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful way to transact in foreign currencies, and pay for things when we’re travelling for work.

In early-April 2025, Wise asked us to provide some additional information on our Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) by uploading a statement of shareholders, and the ID of the owners. Perfectly reasonable stuff for an entity that pretends to be a bank to ask for.

Constraints are the Point

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I get it. I disagree with it, but I get it. The tech industry is throwing obscene amounts of money at LLMs. VCs are salivating over AI startups. The big important executives are regularly bleating about how “we should integrate ChatGPT into our game” because they read some Medium article about the future of interactive entertainment.

But as narrative designers, we need to call this what it is: a massive distraction from what makes game characters work.

Beyond Bad Output

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Deeper Problems with AI in Creative Work

“But AI will get better at writing stories, won’t it?” This response to my rant about AI-generated content misses the point entirely. Even if AI writing improved dramatically tomorrow, fundamental problems would remain that no algorithm refinement can fix.

The environmental cost alone should give us pause. Training even a small LLM produces carbon emissions equivalent to the output of several cars, over their entire lifetimes, and each query consumes significant energy. Game development already has a substantial carbon footprint—why increase it when human writers remain perfectly capable?

The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Are you going to add AI writing to Yarn Spinner?” It’s a question I hear almost weekly these days. Whether at game development conferences, online, or during meetings, there’s an assumption that every tool is racing to implement some form of generative AI. I understand the curiosity—we’re living through an unprecedented wave of AI hype, and there’s genuine confusion about where these technologies might fit into creative processes. So I thought I’d share some thoughts on why we’re taking a different path.