Global Game Changers

UTS Global Game Changers – Faking It - Information Integrity, AI and the Law video transcript

Well, a very good evening to you all on this glorious spring evening in Sydney. Thank you so much for coming out of your homes and your offices to be here this evening. I hope you're well fed and watered and bathroomed before this gets underway. I tried to go and get a drink, but there's too many of you queuing up.

So enjoy your drinks. Tonight.

We're here for the Global Game Changers event. It's called Faking It.

And it's really dedicated to major world challenges that we all know that the planet is facing and even our local communities.

And us as individuals around AI, gen AI, information integrity and the law, which is really quite a heady mix when you think of it.

But I think we can all feel the day-to-day real-life implications of this stuff and I suspect that's why so many of you have turned out tonight to listen to this wonderful panel of experts.

To begin with though, I'd obviously like to honour the ancient traditions and people of this land.

I'd acknowledge that we're meeting on Gadigal land, part of the Eora Nation.

And I pay my respects to the traditional custodians, elders both past and present and I hope you'll join me in that as well.

We're in the Great Hall here at UTS, a full auditorium.

So thank you very much for turning up. And online as well to those of you watching far and wide, 1,000 viewers, I'm told, around the world. So it's great to have you with us here as well.

My name's Hamish McDonald. I'm your host for this evening. I'm a journalist. I think about this stuff all the time.

In part because the business that I work in feels a little bit like it's crumbling beneath us, in part because you don't trust as much And because the business model seems to be disintegrating. So I feel it keenly.

And I also want to understand what the future might look like.

A bit about the order of proceedings this evening and I should remind you, please keep your phones off or on silent.

you'll have an opportunity for some questions at the end. We'll get some microphones out and we'd ask you to stick up your hand when the time comes.

Not yet, mate. We haven't had the panel yet.

But great to see there's some enthusiasm.

First of all, we are going to hear from the Vice-Chancellor of UTS, Andrew Parfitt.

Well then, we'll also hear from Michael Davis, who is going to, I sense, in a sense, bring us up to speed with the key issues.

This is obviously such a huge area of change. It's sometimes hard to distill it all and put it into one single picture.

But Michael's going to attempt to do that in under five minutes for us.

tonight. Good luck. Then we'll have our discussion with this wonderful panel of experts, all with different areas of knowledge and research and understanding both internationally and government, in business.

as well as industry and research. I think it's a really wonderful collection of minds that you're going to hear from tonight and I hope we'll really add insight and value to your understanding of these issues.

But first of all, I'm going to introduce Michael. He's a research fellow at the UTS Centre for Media Transition.

He was formerly a regulatory policy advisor on online information, disinformation, impartiality and commercial influence in news.

the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which I assure you is far more interesting than the title suggests.

But would you please put your hands together for Michael Davis? Thanks so much, Hamish. Yes, in fact, it's a fascinating area.

And look, first of all, I'd like to play a message from the Vice Chancellor.

who unfortunately couldn't be here tonight.

But he would like to send his welcome to you.

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the University of Technology Sydney into the latest installment in the Global Game Changers series Faking It.

AI misinformation and the law. I apologize for not being able to join you in person for what promises to be a very engaging and lively discussion.

Today, we confront the pressing issue of generative AI and its role in manipulating information.

As deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation spread online, they disrupt elections challenge democratic processes.

and infringe on rights globally. This event is crucial as it brings together experts to address these challenges and explore potential solutions to mitigate their insidious events.

I would like to recognise the Faculty of Law and the Centre for Immediate Transition in the Work.

they are doing in this important space.

Our university is deeply committed to addressing the challenges posed by AI and misinformation We are proud to support initiatives that foster critical discussions on innovative solutions.

Thank you for joining us. I trust you will enjoy this critical discussion with our distinguished panel of speakers.

All right, so some of you might have picked up that there was something a little off about that video.

It was in fact entirely produced with AI, including the script.

And yeah, I mean, what does that tell us? I think one thing that we want to think about here is how easy it is to produce a deep fake video Like this. So what I'm going to talk about to begin with is What the threats of generative AI are to do with information integrity.

And the law, what can the law do to address some of these threats.

So let's think about what the threats might be. When ChatGPT was first released, there was a lot of hype and fuss about hallucinations, about potential existential threats.

about the forthcoming singularity and potentially the end of mankind.

humankind, I should say.

Now… In my view, these are not the real threats. And once the hype died down, we found some of this discussion really to drop away. And we started to become concerned about, I wouldn't want to call them prosaic threats but more narrow threats in kind of narrow spaces.

We've seen, of course, anyone involved in higher education has seen no doubt the use of generative AI to hallucinate sources in student essays.

But I don't think the real threat is hallucinations.

we've seen in the law some lawyers hallucinating cases in their submissions to court.

Again, embarrassing.

perhaps not the real threat.

I think the real threat and the real threat Those examples point us to that.

is in fact us and how we use generative AI. So the real threat is not really in the technology.

It's just a tool, but in how we use that tool.

Let's have a look.

at some specific areas of threats.

I think the first one is that AI is cheap.

for the user. It's not cheap.

for the planet, as we're becoming aware.

But for any individual user, it's very easy to use and costs Next to nothing.

So this is our recipe for our recipe The Vice Chancellor deep fake.

A one-minute video from YouTube.

Probably fairly low quality of the vice chancellor. One still photograph actually taken from the video.

10 seconds of voice also taken from the video And that particular video did take five days to make because The Faculty of Engineering and IT, Qing Lan, thank you for making the video for us.

They wanted to do a good job.

But he did say he could make it in a couple of hours.

He also made it with freely accessible open source models.

Right, let's think about what the relative… cheapness of AI, what the implications of that might be.

NewsGuard, which is an organisation that monitors misinformation online found that within three months of the release of ChatGPT, 49 websites were producing AI-generated news content.

And that's now over 1,100.

These churn very high volumes of material and in some cases they're created almost entirely by generative AI.

with no human oversight.

Here's an example.

County local news.

And you can see here in the article, this is the beginning of the article.

on a column called Death News.

An attempt at local news.

You can see that the prompt that's gone into the model here is producing what we take to be common responses from AI models when they come up against the filters that have been built into them in order to safeguard users.

Sorry, I cannot fulfil this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles.

Vaccine genocide is a conspiracy theory that is not based on scientific evidence.

And so on. As an AI language model, it's my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.

Is it? This use of AI is now commonly known by such epithets as AI slop.

and pink slime in a reference to the emulsified meat product used to bulk up mincemeat.

You can see here that there's clearly no human oversight of the content.

And it's also being used to propagate misinformation.

But for what purpose? If you cast your minds back to the 2016 US election.

You might recall that there was a series of Macedonian fake news farms which were producing content targeting users in the US.

In order really to generate advertising revenue.

So they engage in the US political discourse.

They encourage… people taking part in that discourse.

to get fired up.

to get angry, to click through on articles.

And in that way generate revenue for the people in Macedonia.

Now, if you can imagine a fake news farm in Macedonia being a profitable business model.

then AI-generated fake news farms are going to be even more profitable. The cost is almost zero.

So I think there's no need to pay workers here.

These sites can essentially just sit on the internet waiting for visitors to arrive.

Like some kind of yet to be encountered parasite.

Let's turn now to a recent use of deepfake technology.

in the context of the US election.

Today is today.

And yesterday was today, yesterday.

Tomorrow will be today, tomorrow.

So live today.

So the future today will be as the past today.

as it is tomorrow.

All right, the first thing to note again is that the video is, if you look closely enough.

quite clearly fake, right? So the problem is not really about deception.

And I think that goes to the previous point as well.

Just as the previous slide is a kind of misinformation, but its success is not really founded on its ability to deceive.

And that's certainly the case here as well.

So videos like this often take off online not because they're convincing or deceptive.

but because they act as a form of political signaling.

generally to in-groups, to like-minded people.

This is an important difference between political deepfakes and, say, things like financial scams, right? Australians are losing… quite a lot of money to financial scams. In fact, a reported $43.4 million.

in losses from scams on social media this year alone.

And research by Mastercard shows that one-fifth of Australian businesses and one-third of Australians have been targeted by deep fake scams in the past 12 months.

In that case, I think.

where there is a need for deception, we might find that as the technology gets better.

that problem is exacerbated.

But in the political arena, that's not what we're seeing at all.

The second thread I want to look at is that we really just want to have fun.

Here's an Australian example.

from Queensland politics.

This is an ad posted online by the official Liberal National Party account on TikTok.

of the ex-Queensland Premier Saving meals.

All right. Funny, maybe.

Again, it's obviously fake video, right? In the sense that it's an AI-produced video that impersonates a real person.

But it's not really deceptive.

Nor is it misinformation.

Instead, rather than a deep fake, this is often what's called a shallow fake.

Where it's obviously fake.

But it still serves a political purpose.

And particularly, it generates user engagement.

online.

Here's another example, again from the US.

All right, this is clearly a form of amusement, right? In a way, a kind of political cartoon But a kind of political cartoon that's been democratized, right? Anyone now can be a political cartoonist.

by using generative AI.

to create a political image or video.

This video was in fact posted by both Musk and Trump in a kind of signalling Not to each other, but to their supporters.

Paradoxically, an inauthentic video that conveys a message of authenticity.

to their followers.

I think this points us to a key characteristic of contemporary political discourse, especially online.

The third threat is that we don't care about the truth or not nearly enough.

Another example from the US election.

Again, posted by Trump.

Again, clearly fake.

There's no deception here, right? But what's important is the political message.

Again, a kind of political cartoon signalling to the follower base.

Here's an earlier example from the beginning of last year.

Which, interestingly was created by Elliot Higgins, who was one of the founders of Bellingcat, an investigative news outlet. Now, he was just fooling around with generative AI models at home or in the office, who knows. And he created a series of images depicting Trump's arrest.

Now, Trump was arrested, of course, on fraud charges, but these images were produced before that happened.

In a way they depict something that's true, something that did happen.

But clearly, they lack authenticity.

The point I want to make here is that creating the video is one thing and sharing the video is another thing.

And here you can see the importance of people with influence, large follower networks, media figures, politicians.

in propagating these images and videos through the information ecosystem.

Again, deception is not the main issue.

Instead, the images serve to amplify polarised discourse taking over the online political sphere and reducing it to memes and hot takes.

All right.

This strange diagram is a visualization of an online echo chamber.

generated from Twitter data.

It shows how information travels mostly within partisan groups.

And less often between them.

On the right hand side you have people in the right-wing ecosystem on the left-hand side.

people in the left-wing ecosystem.

This study actually found that there's a high correlation between vulnerability to misinformation and partisanship.

But they found that this was true on both sides of the political spectrum.

Although it did find stronger partisanship on the right and you can see that.

In fact, in the diagram.

Another well-known study.

So that false statements propagated much faster and further on Twitter than true statements.

In fact, where the truth rarely reads more than 1,000 people.

The top 1% of false news routinely reached between 1,000 and 100,000 people.

And I took the truth about six times longer.

as falsehood to reach 1,500 people.

Well, what does this tell us? Well, other studies have shown that people often do not believe that misinformation is true.

They're not deceived by misinformation, but they share it anyway.

for other reasons, mostly because it serves some kind of purpose of reinforcing their political identity.

signalling like-mindedness.

That is mostly to people who already agree with them.

The fourth thread is kind of a corollary of the others.

That's that we lose interest in the good stuff.

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world.

Despite its reputation among school teachers.

He's pretty reliable on the whole and for the most part.

Indeed, it's kind of like a lone lighthouse, a beacon of the old school open internet.

where people come together to work on a common goal.

in the service of open knowledge.

This has led Australian journalist Richard Cook to call it the last best place.

on the internet.

It's also one of the biggest sources of data for training generative AI models.

It is after all freely available to anyone who wants to use it.

The biggest worry for many Wikipedians, those in the Wikipedia community, over the rise of Genida AI, is that its potential success might lead to a gradual decline in commitment to Wikipedia.

That's from the public to Wikipedia in maintaining the site So for Wikipedians to maintaining the site and from the public and using it as a knowledge source.

and donating to Wikipedia to keep it going.

Another worry is that, like a snake eating its own tail, generative AI may in fact devour itself.

As generative AI output is used to populate Wikipedia articles and other online content.

And then AI is in turn trained on that. You get what is often called model collapse.

Quite quickly where there's a danger that Well, the AI model essentially starts outputting gobbledygook very quickly.

But I think perhaps more likely and perhaps more likely Perhaps worse is that knowledge is sequestered into proprietary domains or what's known as walled gardens.

Here information might be reliable more or less.

given the propensity for hallucinations and bias.

But it certainly won't be free.

So what can we do to intervene? Can regulation play a role? Can we save what is best about the internet? Or is it doomed to meme fakery? and degraded and angry politics.

A message here from Selena Dekelman.

Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.

There's nothing inevitable about new technology.

we can prioritize human understanding and contribution of knowledge back to the world.

as a key goal of generative AI systems.

And with that, I'd like to open it up.

See the panel.

Thank you very much, Michael.

I'll, if I may, I'll keep the introductions fairly short. They're all very impressive and they all have massive CVs which I'm sure you can all Google. Monica Attard is the co-director of the UCS Centre for Media Transition, a journalist of some 40 years.

Of course, best known from her work on the ABC and she was a Russia correspondent for, I think, two occasions.

well acquainted with the history of disinformation. Karina Chapman is the Deputy Chair of ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

She's also been a senior executive and strategic advisor at some of Australia's biggest media companies.

Cullen Jennings is here. He's the Chief Technology Officer For the American multinational digital comms giant Cisco Systems.

And he helps build collaboration systems used on the internet and strives to make simple, trustable communications available to everyone, which sounds like a fantastic idea.

And Sophie Farthing is also with us, head of the policy lab at the Human Technology Institute at UTS.

Previously, Sophie was the Senior Policy Advisor to the Australian Human Rights Commissioner and of course Michael joins him as well. Would you please welcome them all? I'm tempted as I am to just sit and watch shallow fakes all night. We've got some pretty… serious stuff to discuss. And I thought, Karina, I'd start with you and just some news over the past 24 hours about the misinformation bill here in Australia falling over. It's been consigned to that very deep filing cabinet somewhere underneath Parliament House.

We're all legislation that never makes it through goes.

How should we view it? Is this a sign of just how difficult it is actually for government to get ahead of the curve or even keep up with the curve on some of this stuff.

Thanks, Hamish. Yes, I… The bill had a very interesting passage and a very difficult passage.

And I think it shows that Michael here was demonstrating that when you have true AI where you can see real harms that are clearly illegal.

I'm the classic example is where the Online Safety Commissioner deals with deep fake sexualized material, which is clearly illegal. Pornography, child… child pornography, et cetera, et cetera. It's very easy for governments to deal with those issues. They are illegal.

And as we know, AI exacerbates them.

But when you come to that grey area, which I think is misinformation, which is probably a term which I think will probably now be abolished trash heap. I mean, I prefer to think of false information might be a more accurate way of describing it, but also disinformation, bots and clearly foreign interference, those types of issues.

I mean, the problem here, which is going to now be a problem going forward if the government or the next government, any other government wants to deal with this.

is that it's been so tainted by an enormous political debate which a lot of it didn't have a huge amount to do with the actual bill itself. There was a lot of, I'm not going to say the cliched line, there was a lot of false information about that bill.

that was quite inaccurate. It definitely had flaws.

But it just shows that once you get caught into a political maelstrom of freedom of speech.

it's very hard to have a reasonable debate. So you've been involved in that debate, you were giving evidence at the Senate hearings into it.

Are there clear lines in your mind between the freedom of speech argument the weaponisation of disinformation for clear strategic or political purposes or even interference. Can you delineate these things or is there now just such a mess of information? It's such a polluted information ecosystem that it does all blend and you end up with outcomes like this.

Yes, I think that's right.

I mean, you can't start from a position of freedom of speech and communication is… is absolute. Now, in a way, I have a problem saying that personally because I ran… the media company's right to know campaign for freedom of speech for about five years but Once you get into this maelstrom of the grey area, as I say, it's easy to say that the illegal material should not be there, and that is not a breach of freedom of speech to have it removed.

But once you move into material that is debatable. Where do you go? Now, from a government's point of view.

the front part of that bill, which has now been removed, now been abolished.

is with transparency. And I think that's the starting point.

That's the bit that we're missing. We don't actually know what's going on in line half the time.

The digital platforms, Meta, X, they tell us that they look at material, they tell us that they take certain action in relation to that material.

Maybe they do, maybe they don't.

The main priority of that bill was actually to try and pin the digital platforms down.

and get them to be open and transparent about what they're actually doing and what their policies are.

So if we're thinking about this in the future, Michael.

And obviously those technologies are not static. What's possible is not static. It's developing faster than probably any of us can imagine, is there something fundamental that governments need to do around placing a duty of care on whoever it is that's developing the technology or deploying it.

Thanks, Hamish. Yeah, look, I do think, and to follow on from what Karina was saying.

The key issue here is accountability, right? That we're trying to make digital platforms accountable for what they already do.

So quite clearly people are uncomfortable with the government regulating online speech and with good reason, even though our democratic traditions are strong.

That's a reason they're strong, right? But can I just pull you up on that? Don't governments already regulate free speech? Of course, of course they do, yes. As Sonia said. It's not absolute.

Say again. So what's the big difference? Why does the internet get free reign where the rest of the world doesn't really? Yeah, that's a problem. And that's a problem of accountability. So where a traditional media is already subject to accountability mechanisms through press councils, through ACMA, And so on. And also has a kind of tradition of good practice, right? You don't find that online on digital platforms have come out of nowhere to become the biggest companies in the world.

And they've achieved that by essentially also through kind of lacuna of accountability and a conscious decision to ensure that no one else has a say in what they do with online content.

And I think what we're seeing is a definite movement towards accountability there.

Because platforms always moderate content. We wouldn't go on platforms if they didn't moderate content.

They would just be like a sea of mush, like we saw this pink slime of pornography and whatnot.

We need moderation for platforms to be useful. And they understand that. That's actually their business model.

But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be unaccountable for the way that they operate and what they do with the content that we put online.

They need to be accountable to their users.

That's the first point. And government… Government's role is to be the intervening party to ensure that they are transparent to their users about what they're using. I just want to pull you up there just to sort of insert maybe the Elon Musk-ish argument that might be made to that is, well, our users are telling us they want it because they keep logging on and subscribing and using it and we're growing.

So who are you, Government, to tell us that you know better. Well, that's right, which is why the obligations that probably should be on X and Elon Musk Tell us what you are doing.

Now, ex and Elon Musk have started a community forum where allegedly you can go on and counter information, but How do you make a complaint to X? That's where there is a role for accountability. But that duty of care thing is really interesting because this has become a very strong theme.

Which should be very interesting to lawyers.

Because they want to do one in relation to children, safety online, to accompany the under 16 ban.

I think they'll end up looking at an AI generally.

They may look at it in this context.

It's a road and it's a missed thing in gambling. I think it was one of the recommendations in the Murphy Committee.

In a legal sense. Scams as well. Scams, sorry, Scams has got one. It's a road that the government can punt it down the road to the lawyers, I think, in many ways.

Sophie, what happens to society if this all… kind of crumbles in the way that I guess maybe we're imagining based on some of the scary graphics that Michael showed us but But where we see some of this heading.

And I think we should be scared. We should be concerned. We are talking about a particular bill, but I think one thing that really has arisen out of this debate, and I'm a human rights lawyer, so I take a human rights perspective. It is really important to talk about accountability. And some work we did with the Home Affairs Democracy Task Force, they released a report a couple of months ago And they have some pretty astounding facts and figures in that report talking about Australian democratic resilience.

And the fact that democracies are in decline, like liberal democracies that we all enjoy.

there are less now than there were 15 years ago. I think something like, you know, we've got, what, 2 billion people or something voting this year.

70% of the global population lives under autocracy. So what we're all feeling, this discomfort we're feeling, the polarised debate, we've really got to unpack what that means.

Yeah, we're talking about free speech and misinformation, but what does that mean for the democracy we're all participating in? And this is why we expect governments to step in and protect that because it is freedom of expression, but it's all the things that support us putting that really important vote in the box. When we get to at election time.

You know, it's having safe spaces for active citizens to have debates. It's having trusted democratic institutions.

It's having information that we can trust.

So I think there are a lot of different factors here and I think the really positive aspect of, you know, obviously there'll be some disappointed ministers that they have had to drop a bill around accountability, but it's really what other panelists have already said.

if we don't get to these questions around accountability and how we do it, and it is hard.

We have a problem. To the point you're making though, Sophie, arguments have been made for years, they're still being made.

that actually all of this new technology does support many of those voices, creates different spaces or safer spaces.

It rebalances things in the favour of citizens or minorities against governments or corporations that do no good and all the rest of it.

Is it your view that that argument no longer necessarily holds water? What do you think? I think there's space for both. Two things could be true at once.

favorite thing I use with my children. I think that is really important. And I go back to being a human rights lawyer, a much younger human rights lawyer when the Arab Spring happened, you know, that was about, you know.

information online, but I think back to that, I was a human rights lawyer campaigning in London. When that happened, the realisation at that time of what social media, online safe spaces could do for democracy in a way that we hadn't seen before. I think that's the magic. We have gone a long way.

And we've gone off piste, obviously. But I often think back to, like I was in Libya and Egypt during that time and what I hear coming out of governments, Western democratic governments today sounds very similar to what the Mubarak regime was saying at that very time about Twitter.

So what's changed? Have we changed? Or have the platform's changed? I think maybe our expectations of the platforms have changed. I think it's the technology the platforms are using.

It's the scale and it's the ease. Going back to Michael's first slide there.

It's a technology that's now available It's democratizing technology and that kind of generation of information. But there's a real shift that we've had with generative AI when you can cheaply, easily generate images that have an impact. Some of those were funny.

I do agree. Dancing, Trump and Elon Musk, we all can have a good laugh at that. But I think of the way that some of these technologies are used Including, you know, thinking about AI that was used in a newsroom last year to make a Victorian MP look more womanly, shall we say, like putting that through the male gaze. So I think it's the way the technology is being used and lack of accountability around the use That's the change that we've got.

I think one of the things too that's important to understand is there's so many different layers of companies involved. There's the people who collect the data to build these models. There's the companies that build the models. There's companies that use these models to do the generative AI There's the platforms that distribute that. They all have different roles in being able to test it or detect it. But what's changed a little bit about going back to then is It's not the platform has dramatically changed. It's that the tools that people other than the platform can use to massively generate content The platform may be or may not be doing a good job of detecting and stopping that. But even if they're stopping 50% of it, it's so cheap, this goes back to Michael's point, it's so cheap to generate, even if they can, you know.

stop 999 out of 1,000.

Still, it's so cheap that getting that one through makes it possible to just flood the discourse.

And we have a much better idea. The platforms are really far more optimized this, and I mean this in a bad way of optimized.

of trying to get that attention economy going forward and keep people watching this content. So they sort of like it. Can you give me an example of that? I think that if you look, I think probably people bet in this room better to answer this than me, but you look back at the feeds that we had 10 years ago on whatever a popular social media platform was.

And then compare it to today, you'll see that you see less stuff across from your friends, less stuff broadly things. It's back to that graph we saw earlier with the red and the blue.

more polarized into these ecospheres.

Where people have optimized giving you content that even though you know you probably shouldn't follow that, you follow it anyway.

And you just stay there. You spend more time on. The average times people spend on platforms has gone up over time.

All of these things were sort of a little bit by design of the platforms, right? They wanted to do that. That's more time on the platforms was more advertising.

you're the product they're selling to the advertisers, right? It's not the other way around.

So they wanted to optimize that type of thing.

they weren't necessarily creating any of the content that was there. That was coming from all kinds of other places. So this fake information, disinformation.

The stuff of it that played well into their algorithms got promoted.

And the people who are creating it could spend as much time as they wanted figuring out which played well into the algorithms, which didn't play well into the algorithms, and which got blocked.

And there was no penalty for doing that, so they just keep doing that. And they found stuff that both played well into the algorithms and didn't get blocked.

So Monica, the… The Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, Nobel Prize winner.

talks about the mass pollution of the global information streams.

But she also talks about exactly the sort of stuff that Cullen's just been describing finding itself on essentially a level playing field with the information produced by newsrooms, authentic information.

Is the battle lost in your view? It's pretty close to it, I have to say. It's a bit of a depressing thought, but I think it's really, really difficult for content producers that are producing verified content, factual content that is legitimate.

to disabuse people of their belief in the content, frankly, that is being produced and that is out there, particularly when it's in relation to subjects that are in the news cycle, that are current, that have got everybody talking. There was one that appeared today which was a video of Rachel Maddow from NBC. MSNBC. MSNBC, sorry. Or as Donald Trump calls them, MSDNC. That's the one.

But it was her receiving some late-breaking news about some centre that had opened in Texas to process the children who were legitimate American citizens who who may have to be housed if their parents are turfed out of the United States. And she got a little bit choked up, but this video appeared online which had her crying for an extended period of time, like crying, not even choked up, but crying.

And it kept on, it was doing the rounds on extra day for hours and hours. And despite the fact that community notes appeared below it saying.

This is rubbish. This is not true. This is misinformation.

It just kept on appearing, often without community notes. So, I mean, I think it's very, very difficult even for mainstream media to counteract the misinformation that appears because We're not trusted ourselves and nobody's reading us and nobody's watching us and nobody's listening to us.

Thanks, Monica. Sorry. I do. I knew that you wouldn't like that, Hamish, but I think it's the truth. I mean, we are losing audience. We are losing… people who have faith in us. And I get that. I mean, I think that there is a problem in journalism as well.

that we need to address, which is another matter, not the subject for today, obviously.

But it is part of it, though, right? Because the… The door is open for a conversation about whether real journalism, if you want to call it that, is doing a good job.

And so we're a bit exposed, aren't we, if we're suddenly trying to say, well, we're the answer to this Yeah, look, I mean, I think we've had, I mean, I keep saying we, even though I'm not an active journalist anymore, but I think once you're a journalist, you're always a journalist.

But I think that we've had this problem which has crept up on us. It's been 20 years in the making where our industry has been decimated, so we've lost people and we've lost resources and we've lost lost the ability to produce the kind of journalism that we've all taken pride in, then along comes social media, which is created these tribes of politically active people.

And journalism has tried to deal with that. And what we see, particularly in Australia, is that you have some media organisations that fall in on the left and some that fall in on the right, and then you've got some that are trying to battle through the middle muddy ground of the middle.

And becoming really, really unpopular in the process. And so I think what the end result of that is that some of the kind of tried and true traditions of journalism have gone by the wayside. Impartiality, objectivity, fairness. We've got to look at those things from the inside before we can expect our audiences to really believe what we're giving them.

Okay, I want to move a bit to sort of the future and to the regulation bit, but I wonder, Cullen, if you can help me understand a little bit the business model of some of this stuff, because Michael talked about possible system model collapse, I think you called it.

We hear a bit about shitification of the internet. There's just so much crap that maybe we'll all just turn off.

Now, I want to give you an example, because I am a journalist, but sometimes I appear on Facebook selling crypto.

And… And recently I went to a chicken shop called Charcoal Charlie's.

And the guy there said to me, I watched the most incredible interview you did about crypto with Mark Boris.

who's a mortgage kind of guy.

And I was a bit confused because I didn't remember doing it.

What's the business model of that? Because it's all proliferating all over social media.

Who's making money where and how? Right. So, I mean, obviously across these platforms, there's a wide range of business models, but the predominant ones are these advertising-driven ones that we all use every day.

And they're trying to have you spend time on them. That's really what they care about. They can play more ads and those types of things.

So they are effectively paying content creators at some level to create content. And once that content is created and gets views, it has to be content that gets views.

That's great. So somebody steals your identity and moves off and starts making videos leveraging whatever brand and reputation you've developed.

They start putting those on.

that starts generating views on the platform and they get paid for those views. There's a million more complexities than that, but when it gets down to the basics, that's usually about what it comes down to.

And so one of the things that's happening right now is we're seeing all of this online content.

Not that's necessarily red, but if you just scan all of the data on the internet since 2023, A lot of it is machine generated. And this comes back to what Michael is talking about, model collapse.

When you just feed these models into themselves and let them talk to themselves, it goes crazy really quickly.

And I don't mean, it just goes bad.

So right now there's a real preference to try and use training data that you know wasn't generated by a model, so stuff that's largely came before 2023.

That's actually one of the issues of this whole space is that some of the companies that were large early companies in AI and collected tons of data before it became illegal to collect it in certain ways.

Or before some people noticed copyright violations on it.

They have access to data that probably newer companies and newer entrants won't ever get access to. Lots of people are closing off their access to data that used to be public.

For example, National Public Radio in the US, NPR, has asked none of their data be used for training. It used to be usable for training, right? So there's sort of this closing down of stuff.

And so there's a real concern about where the data is going to come from, how these companies are getting data.

But that hopefully answers a little bit of your question on where the business model of why you're seeing yourself, except not you, on the internet. So obviously there are some that argue you need to work with these companies to create whatever the regulation is. If that's the business model.

Why would you be negotiating with them to do that? Well, I think it's complicated.

All of those companies don't want the whole thing to just collapse and go away and no one to use their, everybody to leave their platform, right? I mean, there's some argument that Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it.

that is losing a lot of its viewership and stuff.

I don't think Musk cares about that.

For other platforms, they might care about losing their customers and their genuine reputation.

So there's that question of why people would want to remain trusted, why it would want to be a source that was not a harmful place, why it was a good place to go.

People would rather be YouTube than 4chan, right? One of those is much more profitable than the other.

So you see companies trying to work in some way to have some sort of regulation.

And that might be in the form of a responsible AI policy. Most companies have some, lots of the companies have some form of that.

that talks about the things you were talking about, about transparency, about being able to reveal what's happening.

But when you really get down to it, if it's just companies making up how they're going to regulate themselves.

The end thing of when they break their own rules, what will happen will be nothing.

So I don't think that that's going to be the only story in the long run. You need something more than just companies make up their own rules and follow them. That's obviously not going to work.

Karina? Yeah, I can't verify this, but I understand that on Facebook.

there's actually scam plages.

that are to warn you about scams.

So… I can validate that. Yeah, that's a very common thing. It brings trust. You bring people in. It brings viewership. It's an exciting story. You go and do it.

I mean, there was a… an airport, but that's not a new idea. There was an airport in a country I won't mention.

where there was a lot of pickpocket thieves that had a huge sign called watch out for pickpockets. And as you walked into the airport.

And everybody reached down to check their wallet. The sign had been put there by pickpockets to help you identify where your wallet was.

But regulation… It's an interesting topic that's been dealt with in so much detail around the world. And when we saw the Bretton Woods agreements But not much sense in the UK. The EU is trying to tackle it. America is to some extent.

And if you look at what Australia's doing, it's got this multi-pronged approach, which I should say no one's actually mentioned this yet but I mean… There's enormous advantages to AI and the technology that it can bring. And I think every government around the world is being very careful to balance that.

There are a number of jurisdictions who are determined to be leaders in AI and they don't want to regulate and we all know that it's globally regulated, so you can evade any legislation. I mean, here in Australia, from a news and information point of view, I think the most that the government is doing at the moment is looking into copyright issues in relation to media, but they're taking very much a high risk approach.

What are the really high risk dangers in AI.

And it's a pretty similar list at the moment than what the EU is using, biometrics.

Police and Law and Order, the things we hear the terror stories out of China.

those type of issues. And at the moment.

they're really looking at only regulating high risk. And coming down to these issues, it's all about scams.

So the scams regulation is where it's happening. But to the point you're making though, presumably governments are faced with a wall of opposition if they even talk about regulation Because the argument against is, well, you'll stifle the brilliant things that we might be able to do. Well, so you pick the problems. So that's why scams is the one that has so much traction. And I mean, if they could possibly get through all these bills this week.

that legislation might get through. But you've just been face to face with the politicians. Do they understand it enough to… Pick the problems. Well, the scams one's extremely difficult. They've picked three areas. They've picked digital platforms. They've picked banks.

And they've pitched telcos. Now, we've actually already got a code with telcos. We work with telcos on scams now to block those calls coming in.

But yes, I mean, this is always the problem. Government's always behind.

The government and regulators are always behind the game. All we can do is create frameworks. And I think what the Miss and Disinformation Bill has now shown that it's not like when I entered this game 20 years ago, we used to say, that's illegal.

You know, that's not permitted. Now you've got to come at a far more nuanced approach, which comes from everything from literacy education, working with the platforms or the banks and whoever you're working with.

and putting guardrails around it. But this government's getting quite impatient And you can see it in relation to scams.

Working with industries, running out of time, I would say.

I think you were trying to get in, Monica. Yeah, no, I was just reacting to what Karina was saying about the benefit. There are benefits to AI, big benefits.

particularly in journalism. I mean, in journalism, you know, it can save A lot of time and a lot of money, essentially, particularly in the back-end processes.

But there's this movement at the moment in big media houses to do deals with AI manufacturers.

Which, of course, is going to bring money through the door, not a lot of money, because the deals haven't been particularly lucrative.

But it does bring money through the door and it's really kind of, they're Faustian bargains. So what are the deals? What are they giving them? Well, they're giving them content.

And in return, what they're getting is the results of AI searches will provide links so they're getting audience.

And they're getting money. But it is a bit of a Faustian bargain because they're also selling whatever, I hate to say it, but whatever little trust remains in them as media organisations.

they're actually selling. And I think that is really, really problematic for an industry that needs to rebuild from the ground up.

on that front. But it struck me when I was thinking about this that whilst they're all selling their trust and they're selling their content.

There is another solution. I'm not quite sure why big media houses haven't banded together to create their own LLMs.

You know, to create the, so they're not selling their content to somebody else. They're not bargaining that away, but they're… their banking on their own they're banking on themselves.

And they're creating a system where people can, an LLM that can be used to get verified information, real information.

And in fact, we are seeing that in Europe, for example, where In some countries the news organisations which cooperate.

more than is the case in Australia, have actually banded together to do that. Yeah, in Australia the problem is, half the problem is competition between media houses.

as it is in the United States. It's really hard to see media houses here cooperating with each other, try and get them to the same meeting. It's almost impossible.

Michael or Cullen, I don't know who's best to answer this. Are there many examples, good examples.

of where AI is being used to actually resolve or tackle any of these problems.

I can leave that one to Cullen. No one wants to answer this. I mean, scans. I mean… There are millions and millions of scams getting thrown in this country, but there are millions and millions that have been stopped.

And it's by AI. And telecommunications companies for all of their work, huge amount is done by AI. And so is there any reason, Callum, why that couldn't be turned on mis and disinformation? It can. It can help. Let me talk a little bit about what I think of happening and stopping scams.

I mean, probably one of the largest things helping on the telecom scams and all of these fake calls that we get.

is a secure caller ID of understanding who they are, which is a technology called Stir Shake, which I'm an author of.

20 years ago is when we started that work, and it's getting rolled out. It could not happen without governments going and regulate it.

started from industry. It's supported and promoted by industry.

But it would never deploy unless the regulators had told telcos they had to do it.

And it forms the basis of reputation systems and trying to center in on what these fake spam calls are. And look, I mean, what you said, the number one problem of the huge financial losses, particularly around seniors, many of them are heartbreaking.

So that's one area.

AI can help look at that, and it's being used by all the companies to try and figure out which are the bad calls, which are the good ones.

some success. It's better than it was. It's not perfect.

Similarly with email scams.

We've all gotten those emails that somebody wants to help us make a lot of money or some variant of that.

And a lot of those are filtered by your email provider. So Cisco is one of the many vendors that makes the type of systems that block those and detect those.

They're particularly important for banks and other people like that trying to detect those.

And AI is used in almost every one of those systems now to try and block and reduce those.

But that doesn't mean you don't still get those. The attackers can see both sides. They can try and send a banned message.

They have a normal email. They can see whether it gets through. So it's a real cat and mouse game, but that's certainly happening there.

And certainly AI is a technique that can be used by all of the, you know.

platforms that we're talking about here to detect LLM content and then try and figure out what to do with it.

What they want to do with it, what they'll decide to do with it is a different thing. They don't want their users all leaving because they fell into some huge scam. That's not their goal, right? Their goal is to keep their users staying there.

But that said, they're obviously letting lots of that type of data through completely with sort of full knowledge of it. And it's hard to describe, or it's hard to decide at what level How much can they do that just with AI? How much do they do that with humans? I think most of the platforms have large moderation teams But obviously not large in any sense compared to the volume of data they're putting through.

That's the problem. So if I can sort of ask you to put your Human Rights Commission hat or lens on for a moment.

I guess the conversations that we are used to having are about the individual or the group against a corporation or a government something that terrible that happened or something good that should be done.

What about if we're discussing systems? How does an individual or a small group maintain its own rights against a system that's not necessarily controlled by one corporation or regulated clearly by a government.

I think, yeah, that is a really interesting question and certainly how I look at these issues.

And I think we as a human rights lawyer.

We are really looking to the regulation that's coming out because I guess I wanted to sneak back to one point before I get into this question, but I think Hamish, you talked about regulation versus innovation. So regulation will stymie innovation.

I think one thing that we are, we're moving beyond that, move fast and break things. And I think that's a really important shift that has happened.

And there have been a few moments where we have woken up to the human rights impact. I will call the human rights impact.

of the Human Technology Institute, we talk about the humans in that.

And I think we are moving beyond really having that understanding of the choices that we have. That will be a human rights perspective as well. I think it's also We often feel, I often feel, like as a layperson in the area that I'm working in, that the big companies are running the show.

I think that often feels like that. And that's where human rights is a really important framework to bring to this because we can demand of governments for our human rights to be protected.

I might just step back just a little bit because when I talk about human rights, I talk about it really practically. I am a human rights lawyer.

which of the Human Rights Commission. And when we bring this framing and when we talk to government about how we think regulation should happen.

We talk about the human rights obligations we have under international human rights law. And they're all the things that people may not think about so much, but that's what protects our democracy.

what protects our human autonomy and our dignity, protects our right to privacy. We've had a lot of chats about that.

So I think, now I can't remember your original question, Hamish, this happens to me. I was just trying to ask really whether there's a distinction in your mind In that sort of scenario between, say, companies, institutions.

governments and then systems.

that not necessarily controlled by any one business or regulated by a government.

Yeah, I mean, that is true. And I think it's a really good distinction to make that we are making decisions about how technology is used in these systems.

But I think although there is not one particular entity in what you're talking about that is in control of everything, I think we are in control of how this technology is used and how it impacts us.

And that's why, as a human rights lawyer, you would look to government to step in or to our incredible regulators.

to step in and to look at the system as a whole. I think it's a really good point you make as well to think about technology as being part of socio-technical systems.

We've had a lot of chats about existential risk, for example. The world is going to end, which is particularly unhelpful because we need to go back to how we're making decisions about technology how we're understanding our current laws, like we've spoken a lot about laws that might be coming and how we can regulate.

We have laws in Australia.

that already apply. And this is not the Wild West where there's no legislation. So I think we need to bear that in mind as well. So thinking about that future.

Do you reckon the 14-year-olds of today that are about to have their TikTok withdrawn might have a different view of this stuff and about what human rights are.

I hope so. I hope. I think we are seeing a turn. I have a tween at home, so we have been discussing this very topic and there is a… So there's quite a lot that has to be worked out with this social media ban and going back to the positives of, there are positives of social media and I think that sometimes has been lost in this debate. There are human rights that are protected. There are safe spaces for particularly marginalised teens. The eSafety commissioner has spoken about this.

So we need to think carefully about how we ban, also about the impact of what technology is used. We don't know yet what that ban is going to look like in practice.

What's that? What that's going to mean for all human rights, particularly our right to privacy.

But I think we have a new generation, we have an opportunity here. They're talking about technology a lot differently now than they were even a few years ago.

There are shifts definitely happening.

So I'm just going to let you know that we will take some questions soon. We've got two microphones.

ready to roam around the room. So if you have got a question, you can just raise your hand and we'll try and get to you.

very soon. I wonder if I can ask you for positive ideas and solutions, answers. We've talked a lot about problems.

So briefly, I'm going to go to you first, Monica, put you on the spot.

Since you're still a journalist.

A solution.

An answer. Well, in the first place, whilst newsrooms are kind of grappling with an increasingly sophisticated kind of generic AI at the same time as looking down the barrel of generative AI that they think very, very carefully about the editorial guardrails that they need to put in place.

And the positive is that I believe based on the research that Michael and I are doing at the CMT, that that is in fact happening, that they do think very, very seriously about it.

And so that's a positive. And the second positive would be, well, it's a wishful thing, but they all kind of let down the competitive barriers and start to work together to find solutions. I know you've been out of the game too long, Monica.

Karina. From a media point of view, I think the first step is to actually be telling their readers and listeners when they're using AI would be… a great enhancement to trust.

And I think we all find that we go on social media and you see something and you think, oh, it's not true, it's fake.

Is it not? the whole trust paradigm is breaking down for those reasons. And I note that one of the other bills that the government is trying to get through this week and probably will is the Electoral Reform Communications Bill, which is not the one that's been discussed about donations and it actually has in there right at the end of the bill, it's a truth in advertising bill.

But right at the end of the bill, it has actually a requirement on For political advertising in the future in the tag.

to declare whether it's been made with AI. So I think from a media point of view.

Tell us when you're using AI. Tell us how you're using AI. Is this the bill that Clarmer doesn't like? I would suspect Clive Palmer doesn't like it. In fact, I don't think any of the crossbenchers are too keen on it. Cullen, a solution. Sorry, that's not true. They don't like the political donations, Bill.

This is a separate bill. This is the truth in advertising.

Colin, truth in advertising sounds good. So I think I agree that probably some low-hanging fruit that can make progress of industry and research and government working together is figuring out how to clearly identify AI generated content.

I think that sort of watching the Digital Market Acts in Europe and how it actually forced a bunch of companies to work together and trying to do something.

It's mostly around interoperable messaging, but I think that's an interesting model where I saw something that was happening in a regulatory environment really cause companies to do something to work together that actually made things better for all of their users.

And this is actually a sort of low-hanging fruit of probably making it better for all users.

Now, in the not so low hanging fruit, I think we move into probably a lot of these problems, like we were talking about the thing here that like.

Truth spreads extremely slowly and fake news or false news spreads very quickly or as often does. It's easy to do that way.

That comes back to the algorithms people are using to decide what to put on things. And I think that regulators asking for more transparency about how those algorithms work.

demanding more choice that users could select extremely basic algorithms in some cases.

might be an area that's actually possible to regulate and is not low-hanging fruit but would have a huge impact.

And I think that comes to sort of my last point that I think is a good thing for them to work together is that It's very hard to know. It's easy to enumerate. There's been great work on the risks and all the problems and the different scams and the economic losses and the three areas you just outlined.

But what to do about them is much harder.

There's some stuff that you can regulate and make a change. And there's some stuff that probably won't change the large tech companies at all because they'll just dissipate the risk off to someone else and you'll never be able to figure out where the problem was.

So working with the researchers in policy, but also the researchers in AI, the large tech companies and the regulators trying to figure out what is regulatable, what things could make a difference. I think that's one of the other areas.

That would be very promising to see work in.

Sophie. Can I sneak in two things? One thing I would say just quickly, I'm going to struggle to spin this as a positive, but privacy reform I think is really important. This is all Our personal information is being used to send us particular information. So I would say that is legislation, that regulation again that may go through this week that has been really well consulted on for years and that I think is really important and positive where government has gone the hard yards and really spoken and consulted properly over several years, that's really good reform.

I'd also sneak in, if anyone's feeling a bit despondent, the Taiwanese digital minister, someone called Audrey Tang.

has done some pretty incredible things encountering disinformation in Taiwan. I go and read.

really interesting approaches that actually haven't involved law but have involved people and education. They have, I was reading today, really interestingly, they have a team in each government department And when there's something that's going viral that is false information.

They have a team that has to spring into gear within 60 minutes and produce that counter narrative across all types of different forums, whether that be the president speaking on a chat show on TV or going out on social media.

I think there are, we're fortunate that we can draw from overseas examples. It's that kind of thinking that I think is the positive and exciting aspect an otherwise quite grim conversation.

Michael? Yeah, that's a great point. And I'd actually raise the work of the Australian Electoral Commission hereto in Australia which has taken exactly that kind of approach with electoral misinformation and disinformation.

in the lead up to elections and the voice referendum and so on.

really engaged approach which, you know.

meets social media users where they are. And in a kind of sometimes lighthearted way as well tries to dispel some of the illusions that they have about The fragility of electoral processes or electoral fraud and so on.

And that really does work very well.

And I think that's also a sign for traditional media if we go back to the the conversation that you and Monica were having, Hamish, about trust there and what traditional media has perhaps lost and I think What it doesn't quite have on the social media environment is that engagement and that ability to be there with the users and to be part of a user group Essentially. And in a kind of slightly disturbing follow on from that.

Some studies have shown that people actually trust.

chatbots more than they trust people.

And you might think, well, that's awful, but that actually raises some potentially quite good uses. And in fact, there was a study which tried to counteract… false beliefs about vaccines, for example, by using chatbots where people would interact with the chatbot. And it would have a conversation with them in a way that a lot of us might be frustrated by if we tried to have that conversation with with a vaccine skeptic or by someone that we're politically opposed to, for example, conversation quickly break down, quickly breaks down. And in fact.

we might find that there's an actual information positive use for AI.

All right, let's try and get to some of the questions. I saw lots of hands go up.

So perhaps if we get a microphone to this gentleman at the front, and if you can tell us your name, please, and make it a fairly quick question, please.

This fellow here.

Hi, my name is Yoon Chinwa.

Very interesting. Thank you for this informative I'm just wondering why none of the panel has mentioned about this deformation law and all that because those are the ones that are ancient law that is That's there to protect the damage.

It could be.

In my opinion, generalized to handle the new AI situation because It's like, listen to this counter and attacking each other using AI is fine. It's like in the old Wild West day that… What's the question? My question is, why is our panda doesn't look at, or the government doesn't look at the deformation That's a model to generalize.

and to modernize.

So that any damage tangible or intangible to a person can be.

identify and someone can sue Okay. Another person as well as… the actor can be identified and the enabler accessory like the… Understood. All right, we'll take our next question as well and we'll get some others. There's a gentleman here with his hand up in the blue.

Light blue? Yes, thank you so much for this discussion. It's really interesting as somebody studying media and law at the moment. I wanted to ask about meta. So it's worth 1 trillion USD on the American Stock Exchange.

If there was a proposal to make it reveal its algorithm and its algorithm is its intellectual property which is underpinning its whole net worth and its market capitalization, why would it not, why would Meta not just pull out of Australia like it did with the news media bargaining code because it would be too much at stake for it to reveal.

the IP and potentially lose market share of another business comes around copying its IP.

Did you want to have a go at that, Colin? So I don't work for Meta, but let me take a quick stab at this.

No, I think you're right that they would not want to fully reveal their whole algorithm.

I think that they would be possible to allow people to put user choice in their algorithms. In fact, they were mandated to do that in some places in Europe where they got a very different feed and you had a paid for You had to pay a monthly fee for it. So they have already done this a little bit in the past.

But revealing statistics about their algorithm, I think they'd be very willing to do, not very willing to do. They could do without impacting their market cap in any way.

And allowing people to have some choice in algorithms could happen under some circumstances. They've already bridged into that space.

So I think that that's somewhat there. No, I don't think that they're going to open source their algorithm. And look, we watch the US ask TikTok to do exactly that, and they basically declined So I think that would be a similar experience for Meta Karina, were you wanting to add something to that? No, except it's the really thorny issue is jurisdictional issues and I think every part of the Australian government is looking at it.

But you're right.

If you want to operate a business in Australia, you need to comply with Australian law.

But a lot of it is about acceding to the jurisdiction. But I just want to say on defamation, I mean, it's just too clumsy.

That's partly the problem. I mean, Twiggy Forest has been trying to sue Meta for your chicken shop problems and in interviews and is failing and is trying to run his case through California.

Which goes to your jurisdictional issues again. Again, it's a bit like GDK. I think GDK is a great idea, but It's going to be slow. And defamation is slow. It's the problem. When you say this is the ongoing issue, the jurisdictional issue, I mean, is the government conceding? Obviously, there was an attempt to rein in X earlier in the year.

Is the government effectively conceiving that it can't? Because, I mean, we blinked, didn't we, ultimately in that case? I think you're talking about the Safety Commission case. I mean, I can't… I can't talk to it because I'm not across it. No, I don't think the government has… No, they're not conceding the ground, no.

To your point, the question I think you're asking, I think there are things that many of the large tech companies would walk away from the Australian market versus do.

That is a fact. I mean, end-to-end encryption is probably one of them.

And so that is true.

But if you can work with other governments and make it worldwide, that's a bigger question.

All right, let's take another question. There's a lady at the front here. We'll get the microphone to you as quickly as we can.

If you could state your name and maybe direct your question to whoever you want. Yeah, I'm Helen Voterbeck. I'm glad we've got two ABC people here, former and… But don't worry, I won't ask you any hard questions. I was very interested to hear that in Taiwan they're focusing on educating the public.

And I also feel that education will play a very key role because we can't control these corporations.

The people, what can control them, however.

is market share. So if people become sick and tired of being scammed or just don't enjoy the experience anymore.

people will turn away.

The corporations need us to be engaged and we'll be engaged when we trust what we're getting. So it can be a two-way thing. So if we can build up trust from a school age, but also for you know adults and so on. And I can really see a role for our public broadcaster to help us understand. So to expand the role of the ABC, to educate us on what we're being exposed to. I'll put this to Monica. Sounds like it's one for you, actually, Hannah. I can't comment on behalf of anyone. I mean, I've actually just been in Finland And met the education minister there where they're teaching myth and disinformation from primary school age up and they say that it's having quite a massive impact on the broader. And I think we're pretty slow.

as we are on many, many issues, but media literacy I think is a really good example of it.

We now talk about media literacy beginning at a very young age. We're talking about it for older people who tend to be on Facebook, for example, because that's not where young people live.

We're talking about it now, but we're… we're only just talking about it. It's only been the last four or five years, I think, that we've taken it quite seriously. But it is something I agree with you, it's something that has to happen.

from a very, very early age and then again at a very, very late age for people who people who are post 60 or maybe post 70, whose well-being is tied to their presence, for example, on Facebook.

And who are being scammed and who don't understand what they're reading. And of course, if Meta does end up pulling out of news in Australia, which is quite possible.

that problem is just going to worsen. So it is something that we need to look at.

We'll get to a couple more questions. There's some hands at the back. So there's a lady in the middle.

Can you get the microphone to her? Yep.

Thanks. What's your name and what's your question and who's it for? I'm Chloe. This is just kind of for whoever can answer it, but… Do you believe that AI will have an impact on surveillance capitalism and data mining on social media sites and therefore on politics and democracy in the future? How about you have a go at that, Sophie? Yes, I think that is the answer. You've really hit on… the business model that we were talking about before. I think the shift, maybe I can tie a few of those questions together actually about that interaction with individuals And speaking about young people, digital literacy and the liability question, I think There's some really, when I said before, I think we're having a shift. I think we are. So at least we understand now what the models are. So when we talk about surveillance capitalism, we all now understand that we are not getting things for free. I think that came with the Cambridge Analytica scandal where we realised that all this personal information we're feeding into these platforms is being used because it's being monetized.

So I think we are stepping towards an understanding. I think that's been really important for all of us to understand and for everyone to say.

We're not so cool with that anymore. The other thing just on earlier questions of talking about liability, I think someone had a gentleman had a question there about there's some really interesting cases I think, that are coming out of the US that are really looking to pin liability for social media harm. So I think what we are going to, very sadly, I think we're talking about In particular, a recent case I've been reading about that didn't involve a suicide of someone who got enamored with a chat bot and character AI. So I think where we are moving towards is getting A, the understanding of how we're interacting with these systems.

And B, we're getting to some harder edged questions about liability, who is responsible for producing products, because if you buy a chatbot, it becomes a product, not just a a platform dispensing information. So I think that ties into having that understanding and having some guardrails in place.

Yes, it's having a huge impact.

I think we are stepping towards making sure it doesn't have such a negative adverse impact on all of us and the protection of our human rights.

Okay, one last question. There's a gentleman right next to the microphone, so we might just… a few rows back, just there, yeah.

Either of these two guys. You take your pick. Your name, who are your questions for, and please, please.

Okay.

Greg Porter's my name. I… became the IT director at UTS in 1991.

In early 92, I got a call from the Australian Federal Police to interview a student who'd managed with a mate and managed to hack into a couple of small US government departments like US Defence and NASA.

It's a good training at UTS, obviously.

Quite clearly. What's your question? One more second about that, but a few years later I also had a visit from the politically motivated violent crime squad.

on behalf of the US Secret Service, one of the students had happened to threatened Clinton and his wife.

And blow up the World Trade Center.

Life is an IT director at a university is a lot of fun.

What I learned at that time was that our behaviour on the net.

is quite different to our behaviour in real life.

And our sense of values is quite different.

And that is the essence of the problem that we actually have.

And there's no, and people have mentioned accountability for what we do.

I think we've actually, the horse has already bolted.

But somebody mentioned the case in Melbourne, for instance, with Channel 9 down there.

It seems to… The case there… seems to fit the Australian Government definition of negligence.

So we've got a whole lot of opportunities to press home accountability but it seems to me we're not doing it.

Now, I know we are in a lot of cases but you know.

It seems to me we're doing lots of good stuff, don't get me wrong.

The behavioural problem is still there.

How can we improve that? But we need to have law actually be more active. How to improve it? That was the question.

I might jump in on this one.

Look, I think that's true.

humans are often not nice people, right? But the problem is.

which of our characteristics are promoted? online and I think you've put your finger on it, and it goes back to a point from Cullen as well is that Often we find that engagement-driven algorithms pick up on that negative behaviour rather than the positive behaviour.

If I go back to a point in the presentation from the beginning.

about the last best place on the internet.

Wikipedia is quite different.

from Twitter or Facebook.

It's a community where people come together.

you know, kind of old school internet way They have a common goal to promote knowledge and to promote open and free knowledge.

And, you know, obviously it has problems. Obviously, there are conflicts as well between users.

But on the whole, it gets along fine, just as we remember, if we do remember what the internet was like in 2003 or four or five, right? It was a better place back then in that sense.

So there is a room for accountability for social media platforms and other digital platforms.

to make them accountable for what Renee DiResta calls the infrastructure of influence, which is this the way that algorithms interact with human behavior, interact with different actors online, malicious actors.

And so on.

to certainly distribute accountability where it deserves to be distributed.

Digital platforms are not responsible for all online problems.

users are responsible for some.

But it's how the interaction occurs that is really the key here.

And I think what we're finding is that the regulatory approach is kind of treating a lot of symptoms and trying to treat them all at once in a kind of piecemeal way.

And really, we need to get to the number of the issue, which is a general accountability for digital platforms, for AI companies and so on about the risks that they present to the public and to individuals.

We are going to have to leave it there. This has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for your wonderful questions.

Would you please thank Monica Attard, Karina Chapman, Cullen Jennings, Sophie Farthing.

And Michael Davis, please put your hats up.

Thanks for coming tonight. Have a great evening. Good night.

Hi everybody and welcome to everyone, not just here in Australia but everyone who's Zooming in from around the world. We have just shy of 2,000 people in the room with us virtually and physically for this event this evening, which is pretty great. So, we are literally touching all points of the compass, which is fantastic. We're in the centre of something significant here. This is the first event of a major international speaker series, The UTS Global Game Changers series, that is being hosted here at UTS. The whole idea of the series is to tackle the issues that matter most today, and you can imagine, across the campus, there are lots of different opinions about what matters most today, from sciences to engineering and all the rest. But tonight, we're talking about green infrastructure. I'll get to that in just a second.

The first thing I would like to do, the way I would like to start proceedings here, is with an Acknowledgement of Country and to acknowledge the ancient land upon which we are standing. I always find this is a really serious thing. I mean, as an architect or someone who's studied architecture, I think a lot about place and where we are and how important context is. So, when I do these Acknowledgements of Country, it always makes me stop just for a second to think, "Yeah, this place has been around for a while. I'm only a newcomer here, and there are people who have a lot of knowledge about where we are." So, it's a customary thing here in Australia to pay respects to the land and to the people who have lived here for thousands of years at the beginning of any important gathering, and this is most certainly an important gathering.

As I said before, we have all of us in the auditorium here in the UTS Great Hall, and we have everyone with us online. For those of us who are here in person and for the many hundreds of viewers watching internationally, the Welcome to Country or the Acknowledgement of Country extends to everybody. Welcome to everybody. So, in honour of this great land and its ancient traditions and people, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and to pay my respects to the Elders, both past and present. It's one of those things that's taken us a long time to listen to that knowledge and that wisdom, but we are listening and we are learning, which is wonderful.

Right, so we're here to talk about green cities. Green cities, and I hear you say, "What is that?" I'll get to that in just a moment. The first thing I want to do is introduce these lovely people who are up here on stage with me, and our best friend Remy, who's over there. He normally lives in Nairobi, but he's currently in Frankfurt doing important UN business. I'll get to Remy in a second. First, I want to introduce Rob Stokes, who's here on stage. Rob, welcome! Round of applause for Rob. You know the name, you know the man. He's a leading Australian spokesman on city planning and the importance of net-zero cities. Former New South Wales Minister for Planning and Public Spaces—boy, that was a job! Life after that, hey? It's good, huh? Yeah, it's a lot more comfortable now. It was a lot of fun. Passionate about beauty in people, nature, and urban spaces. I'm now thinking of Rob as our poet in politics. Welcome, Rob.

Right here on this end of the seats is Jua Cilliers. She is a global leader in urban planning and green infrastructure solutions. She is also the Professor of Urban Planning and Head of the School of the Built Environment here at UTS. She runs the school, which is why she's so busy, and she's known—this is a funny story behind this one—as a defender of the future. Just sit with that for a second. This is what a defender of the future looks like, everyone. I think we're in good hands, don't you think? Yes.

Germain Briand is here with us, also sitting in the centre. Woohoo! He's an innovative entrepreneur and he connects nature to city environments. He's the owner and director of the Urban Canopy Australia, and he's on a mission to reconnect people with nature. He's the entrepreneur bridge builder whose whole job is to give us the pathway back to nature, which I think is a great job to have. Thank you for joining us.

And zooming in with us on the big screen here is this very impressive-looking gentleman who's six foot tall, and we're only seeing him from the shoulders up, Remy Sietchiping. He is an international strategist on urban planning and geographic information systems. He's a community educator and he is also the Chief of Policy at UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in Africa. Remy, welcome to you. Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Alright, so what is green infrastructure? I'm going to take a little second here to set the scene, and then my learned colleagues here are going to take the conversation away. My whole job is just to keep them talking, but I think they're going to do a great job of that on their own. What I want to do first is ask you to close your eyes just for a second. Close your eyes. Now, imagine the perfect city street in your mind's eye. The perfect city street. Give yourself a second to form that image. What's going on in that mind? What are you seeing now? I bet the first thing you're seeing—you can open your eyes now—I bet the first thing you're seeing are the people around you. Yeah, give me a quick show of hands if I'm right. Yeah, the people, that's the first thing you notice. Okay, a couple of people. That's the first thing I think of, and I polled everyone in my family about that, and they all said, "Yeah, the people." What's the second thing you saw? I bet there were trees on the street. Yeah, who had trees? Oh, okay, that's better. That's feeling a lot better. So, isn't that interesting that the perfect city includes—well, okay, let's put trees at the top of the pile. Trees are one of those things that are the first thing you think of when you think of a city. Now, think of downtown Sydney or downtown any city, for that matter, and think of how many trees you can count, again in that mind's eye of yours. Not as many as you'd like, right? Am I right?

So, with that thought in mind, that perfect idea in mind, urban—and now I'm reading this, so excuse me for reading—green infrastructure refers to all of the vegetation that provides environmental, economic, and social benefits such as clean air and water, climate regulation, food provision, erosion control, and places for recreation. Green infrastructure includes urban parks and reserves, wetlands and stream corridors, street trees and roadside verges, gardens, vegetable patches, bikeways, pedestrian trails, wall and rooftop gardens, orchards, farms, cemeteries, and derelict land. That's a lot, don't you think? These aren't my words; this is coming from the CSIRO. So, this is the definition that we as a research community would probably defer to as what is green infrastructure. But I think you can see from just that that it is very encompassing. It includes a lot, and as you can imagine, that idea of green cities with all of those different components requires enormous expertise across a broad wave of not just the university campus but across all of our disciplines, ranging from planning, landscape architecture, architecture, horticulture, ecology—what else have we got? Psychology, engineering, and policy, and that's just for starters. Basically, as we know, cities are big, complex animals and they're very hard to tame. They're very hard to direct. They're very hard to kind of point in a direction that we know is better because cities kind of have a mind of their own because there are a lot of people involved.

So, with that kind of situation in front of us, let me tell you a little bit about why some of the green benefits—or the benefits, sorry, of green infrastructure—are there to sort of not so much tame the city but to orient it in a better direction for our future. Some of those benefits include things like—I'm just thinking, actually, before I give you that, I'm thinking I'm about to list a few things for you but really these aren’t nice-to-have things; these are really need-to-have things in our future cities. So, this kind of list of want-to-haves is actually—no, these are the must-do things for our cities going into the future. So, with that in mind: sustainability. Green infrastructure gives us cooler streets, management of heat island effects, flood and stormwater management, cleaner waterways and air, drought tolerance, and lower building and energy needs. And that's just sustainability for a starter. Public health: better air quality, better water quality, cooler and calmer streets and neighbourhoods. Social benefits that bring us outside, that reconnect us to nature—that one's going to Germain—allow humans to use the city again. That perfect city we're all imagining? That's the one where we're all outside. We're all outside on the street, probably in some Parisian café, sitting on a street corner having a cup of coffee. But we're outside, we're with other people, and we're enjoying the ambience of being there. And biophilia—if you haven't heard that expression, it’s basically that feeling you get of wellness and goodness when you are with greenery, when you are with nature.

There's a science behind this, and I'm not going to go into it now, but basically, you know that when you look at a tree, you feel better. The other day, I heard a stat that if you spend 7 seconds, I think it was, looking at the ocean, you start to feel better. Just 7 seconds of watching the waves will actually physiologically calm you down and make you start to feel better in your whole body, physically and emotionally. So, that's biophilia—that's our connection with nature. So, that's just another one of those benefits.  

Costs—now this is the one where everyone goes, "Oh yeah, but that's going to cost a fortune. Why would we do that? Just way too expensive." Not true at all. Think about it like this: you spend a lot of money, billions of dollars, putting in freeways and what do you get for that? You get people in cars moving from A to B and back again. Now, think about putting in something like a stream that deals with stormwater, cleans the stormwater, gives people a place to walk, somewhere for my dog to go for a walk. All these benefits of health and things that I've just mentioned—these are all the add-ons that these infrastructures give you. So, you pay for one and you get ten. So, the cost-benefit analysis, the research is still really being done, but all the indicators are that you're getting such better bang for your buck in green infrastructure rather than the kinds of grey infrastructure that we're used to talking about when we talk about the city. So keep that in mind. I also heard somewhere that a treed street in a Sydney suburb will put $50,000 on the sale price of a property on that street. Something like that. Yeah, now I've got your attention, haven't I?

So, with that in mind, the last thing I want to mention too is aesthetics. Now, I'm a professor of architecture, so I dig aesthetics. I think they're important. I think how beautiful things look is an important thing for us to think about. When we talk about aesthetics in terms of green infrastructure, it's back to that vision of the city that you first started with. Yeah, the one that's in your mind. You go, "Yeah, of course it's a beautiful place. You don't want to go and hang out in an ugly place. You want to go hang out somewhere that makes you feel good and visually that entices you to some kind of ownership almost. You want to feel connected to something that has that beauty for it." Now, you define beauty in your own way, but that idea of beauty and aesthetics is a part of the green infrastructure, and that's why we think of green trees and such when we think of a beautiful city.

Alright, now this is an intensely local and global phenomenon. 68% of the global population are expected to live in urban areas by 2050, according to the UN. And in Australia, for those international people who are zooming in, it might surprise you to learn that here in Australia, 73% of us already live in the major cities across Australia. So this is a big issue, and it's one that will have effects whatever we end up doing. It will have effects at a very large—dare I say—planetary scale. So these moves we're making now are not insignificant. They are really big issues. So, with that, that's enough from Anthony. With that, now I want to sort of take the conversation to the esteemed panel that we're here to talk with today. And Jua, you get the first question. Given all those wonderful benefits that green infrastructure seems to obviously provide us, why is it taking us so long to implement green infrastructure in our cities?

A really great question, Anthony. I think that is what all of us are shouting: why are we not doing this? I think three reasons from my side. The first one is, it's really inconvenient, right? We've been used to business as usual, and we know how to plan cities and we know how to build the buildings, and now you're asking us to do it differently. Really, it's really inconvenient, yeah? So we tend to just go with business as usual, right? So there's a part of that, right? We are challenging how we think about cities and nature and how we plan everything from the start to the end. The second thing for me is, it's a lack of leadership—policies, legislation, things enforcing this but also people standing up and saying, "Hey, we should be doing this," right? It's not a nice-to-have; it's a necessity, as you said. So 0.3% of urban infrastructure budgets goes to green infrastructure or nature. Just say that again. How much? 0.3%. Remy, you can check me if I'm quoting incorrectly. 0.3% of all urban infrastructure budgets goes to greening or green or nature-based solutions, which is ridiculous. So we need collective leadership to say this should change, right? So this, for me, is the second thing. And then the third thing is really those benefits that you called out. I really think we don't understand the value of nature and what it means for us as individuals and for our cities. I think we almost take it for granted, but we've never lived in an urbanised world that it is today, and we are seeing we are losing greenery across all our cities. So we're going to lose these great benefits; we are going to lose the medicine that you explained, right? And so, in a way, it's really to realise it's not a luxury; it's a necessity. And I had to throw in there, maybe it's because we haven't had it on Grand Designs yet. That's maybe why we still aren't pushing the buttons. So, there's a teaching component here because the knowledge about the benefits is not being communicated, so that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, there's a leadership issue. Actually, that makes me think then, Rob, do you, you know, you've got a fabulous career and a deep knowledge of politics. In your mind, is this green infrastructure question a technical question or is it a cultural question?

It's entirely cultural. When you started with that beautiful acknowledgment of country, part of acknowledgment is acknowledging that we have imported ontologies, ways of knowing, laws, cultures from the other side of the world, and just imagined that we can somehow translate them into an entirely different context and completely ignored the people who had lived here continuously since the dreaming. And so we instinctively, at some level, are scared of nature. A more recent British visitor to Australia, Bill Bryson, the travel writer, said that about Australia—everything's trying to kill you. And there's a sort of sense that, "Oh, we've got to control our gardens or our environment because it will make it safer that way." I mean, of the top four selling plants in Australian nurseries, you've got a type of ornamental privet, you've got English box, you've got Leylandii greens, otherwise known as spiked trees because they're there to block out the neighbours, and there's one native that makes the list. It's a lilly pilly, it's called "No More Neighbours." And so our entire, you know, the way we think about nature is how to exclude others and how to make it neat and tidy and ornamental so it doesn't get in the way. Nature's messy and we want to make sense and control of our lives and, you know, that's a great thing about a lawnmower. It's your little bit of, you know, exerting control over nature. I mean the nature strip, there's nothing natural about it; it's a b lawn. So it's entirely... and I was fascinated during my time in politics. I remember once actually I got given... I went to speak at something and I got a lift and they'd given me a little tree as a gift. It was lovely and I got in the lift in Parliament and there were a bunch of parliamentarians there, probably a little bit more right-wing, and they said to me, "Hey Stoky, what do you got there?" and I said, "Oh, it's a... it's a... it's a little tree. It's a baby tree." "What are you going to do with it?" and I was kind of getting a bit intimidated at this point and I said, "I'm going to plant it." They said, "Why would you do that? And it'll... it'll get stuck in your drains and then you'll be sorry." And like, "But it's just a little baby tree." Anyway, but there's that mentality, there's something scary or that needs to be controlled, and it comes from this colonial, colonial settler mindset that's still very much there.  

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what do you think then about Jua's point about leadership though? Do you agree with Jua?  

Entirely. There's leadership. What's that old saying in, you know, the series Yes Minister? You know, "Well, that was courageous." There's doing courageous things that are career limiting, and the clever things are the incremental change that no one... that you can get away with. COVID was an amazing time to do things that you could get away with because we trialled, for example, you know, like bike lanes. I was amazed. You try and put a motorway in Sydney and, you know, there's a little bit of resistance but most people go, "Oh yeah, we need to get where we're going faster." Try to build a bike lane, everyone goes absolutely bananas. But in COVID we were able to just put them in and say, "Oh, well, they're temporary," and then just left them there.

Can I chip in? Leadership... well, I call it leadership because there's good examples globally where we do get this right, right? And so there are some world cities that do get it right, or individuals.

So it's not like we're... everybody's lost, but it's a leadership and it's standing up for it and pushing through with it."

"That is a perfect segue to Remy. You with us?"

"Remy?"

"Yes, I am. I hope you can hear me."

"Oh, that's great. Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. I want to throw that question then to you and ask, you know, this idea of green infrastructure from your perspective, you know, as the UN. You are our UN representative here. Do you think of it as a global issue or a local issue?"

"Well, thanks a lot. I believe that global is also local. Everything that happens globally affects things locally and vice versa. So within the... I can hear some echoes but I hope it's okay. Within the framework under which we are operating, the social sustainable development goals, if you look through, many of them actually touch on infrastructure, on the environment, on, you know, resilience. All the topics that we're going to cover here. So it's an issue of global relevance. If you take one dimension, which is climate change, that we are all familiar with, we know that we are witnessing how it manifests itself, and this was not... this was... we still had some deniers around but 30-40 years ago that was not the issue. So sometimes push comes to shove and then you have to reckon with it. But I just want to take us a little bit back. I don't know, you might have read the great book by Jared... The Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In that book, for those who have not read, you will understand that we are... many of the societies actually had neglected the value, the benefits of nature, and turned into consumerism rather than living with that nature in a more, you know, symbiotic manner. And that had come at a cost, and we today we are also facing similar situations. And I know that we already mentioned the importance when we culturally, I think Rob had clearly indicated, it's mainly cultural. I agree because nature-based solutions are not easily, you know, reflected. People cannot relate easily and Prof had mentioned, but the element of beauty, aesthetic, that you Anthony, you mentioned is also relative, it's subjective, but still we have some common thread that we can look at. We don't know if green is actually a good sign for everybody. In some cultures, green is not good. In some cultures, it's not good but in others it's actually a sign of aesthetic, reconnecting with your place and nature. But I just want to also add the element of heritage. Nature is heritage because that's why we talk about tangible and intangible heritage. And until we bring all these things together in terms of nature as part of our common heritage, then we continue struggling. One example, just to illustrate the point, is the during the COVID-19. It must still be fresh in our mind. Green space was or parks were the most sought-after spaces because this was one of the unique environments where we can practice more social distancing while enjoying nature. Those who were suffering from COVID were, you know, encouraged to have some... Elements of sunlight, green spaces, and clean air – all these things are important. But globally, one of the unintended consequences of COVID was that the untouched nature, the, you know, the hardly less impacted environment actually grew. It was a positive thing for nature globally. Some plants and areas recovered, just to say that nature is there, and we have to nurture it. We have to do our best to live with that and keep nature as one of our best friends. If you were to be the champions and be the city, the champion of the future, as Professor just said and who she is, so let me stop here just to say that this conversation is very important and globally very relevant. I'm not going to let you off the hook just yet because what you're saying is, yes, it's everyone's problem. It's a global problem. Global solutions. It is a common humanity, a common humanity that we're talking about here. We all fell back in love with our local parks when COVID came along, no matter where you were on the planet. But the other side to your answer there was to let us in on the idea, and this is the challenge, I suppose, that it's a different conversation in different cultures and it has to be. So the common ground we're looking for, maybe that just doesn't exist. No, it does. It does actually. Just give you an example. Who would not like to have some form of green, some, some, I don't know, plants? We, I think Rob had mentioned some energy efficiency, managing your waste differently, or managing your water differently, having a bit of a veggie garden, got something that you have grown and you could actually eat or enjoy and see that grow. So that type of habit exists everywhere, so there are some commonalities in actually taking action. Locally, of course, if you live in an ecologically unique space, it could be a desert or another environment that might be different, but it must still have native plants and a native environment. Because greening is not only about having plants, you know, you can still create the ambiance.  

I saw a business, we have Germain here, he can pick some of these ideas where they were actually trying to create, you know, we know the digital twins and try to create environments that mimic nature just to keep our mind and culture closer to nature. It might be artificial; we are quite familiar these days with artificial plants or artificial things. But just bringing that type of element of nature back into our living environment, even artificially, is a step towards that. So I believe that ecologically they might adapt, but they might still be very, very relevant. Nature exists everywhere regardless; culture varies, always, always important. I'm going to say from policy then to product Germain, this is you now because you're the innovator and the bridge builder, right? You're the one who's responsible for, in some way, landing these grandiose ideas literally in the city. So where do you see the problems and where do you see the opportunities? Yeah, thanks. I couldn't help myself so much when you were talking there. I think the problem starts here.  

There's that great quote from that American anthropologist called Gregory Bateson that says most of the problems we see in the world today come from the difference between the way people think and the way nature works. Nature works in ecosystems; we work in silos. Nature brings so many benefits to our cities, which is great, but in the way we currently work, it is also an issue because different people are responsible for different outcomes in our cities. Yet, when you're talking about a solution that is all-encompassing, you end up with a problem because who's going to look after that? Oh no, it's your thing. Well no, I thought it was your thing. No, we're not going to do that, it's too complicated because it's holistic. Because it's going to mean the landscape architect is going to talk to the architects, it's going to need to talk to the planners, it's going to need to talk to the bicycle people and everybody in between. You've got social groups or ethnic groups in Australia, you know, huge diversity in our cities. Some ethnic groups don't like nature so much. There's even people, if ever you guys have heard that word, it's called dendrophobia. Dendrophobia means fear of trees. Some people are scared of trees; they run in the other direction. That exists. Rob just told us they get in your drains, right? So we've got to be aware of moral types of fear. But the point is, nature is complex and it works in ecosystems.  

We work in silos, and for as long as we're not going to learn to do that, and that's so pertinent in the context of local and state government, where I see it in my work every day when I try to talk about bringing nature. The people who work in the sustainability department don't talk to the urban planner, don't talk to the placemakers, don't talk to the landscape architects. They're all doing their things in their own corners, and so that's not going to work. So until that happens... now to your point about being cultural, for sure. But this dates way back, you know, the colonials, the British coming. That's Newtonian science that makes the world easier to understand for us humans; we make it more simple, we put it into boxes. And even in academia, in academia you've got different faculties and a PhD is so narrowly focused on one point, where it could so much benefit from being in partnership with other parts of the university. When this type of thinking starts being applied at university... I'm so glad he's saying this because I'll have a moment to market the green infrastructure lab that's very transdisciplinary. That's right, but no, I'm talking to you because I know you understand. I know he, the Vice Chancellor, is listening, just so you know. Of course, that's right. We both know. But the risk with this as well... and I'm talking about university models in general, obviously not pointing fingers... but the risk with that as well is, the more complex the more knowledge we get, the even more focused on little things, and the more likely we are to miss the bigger picture because our knowledge is getting more and more granular. So it's a real challenge. We need to embrace complexity.

Alright, but let's get to the part where you've got all green lights and all those planners and policymakers, and everyone's green lights intended... you like that? I just worked that one in there. What is it exactly that you are putting into our cities? I mean, from a product point of view, what is this infrastructure that we're literally talking about? Yes, we're talking about trees, but you know, we're talking about businesses and we're talking about a whole kind of raft of perhaps a new industry that's emerging to do this sort of work. What exactly does that mean to you?  

Well, there's new challenges now with climate change. We've got a challenge of how our city is warming up. This didn't exist before. Oh, okay, so you know, when cities were designed, nature was a nice ornamental thing we just put there because it looked nice and we know that people like nature. You know, we'll touch on biophilia, but this was the sole purpose of nature. Now we're like, oh, that actually is the best air conditioner and it's natural, and it has so many other benefits. Yet, our cities were not designed to plant more trees. You know, our cities were designed with a lot of hard infrastructure and the challenge is when you're talking to engineers, we say that tree there doesn't behave like a brick wall, does it? Oh yeah, not too hard, you know, that grows and it grows this way and that way, and how do we deal with that? Too hard.

And so the key is to try to find solutions that bring nature into the city in a predictable way. So it's about finding the best of both worlds, yeah? Okay, right, in trying to bring nature in so it ticks most of those boxes that a tree would. Maybe not all, but it's easier to implement because it ticks the boxes of the people who design our cities. Alright, but at this point we started, I mean, I started off my bit up there at the beginning all positive. Yeah, green cities, that's a beautiful future. Who doesn't want that, right? I want to walk near a waterway with my dog, and now at this point you're all agreeing that this is too big a holistic problem for anyone to solve and it's kind of... I'm starting to get depressed. Is this, should I be feeling this way? I mean, give me some hope here.  

No, there's so much that has already happened. The question is, can it happen quickly enough? Right, you look for example, some people might be you know, in this audience might be old enough to remember when you could... I came when you could grow up on Sydney's Northern Beaches. I remember when you could actually smell the sewage coming out of North Head. It was just this, you know, and the water was filthy, and we solved that problem. I remember I used to surf at Queenscliff and I remember that exactly what you're saying, and with certain winds you just wouldn't go. There you'd get an ear infection, it just wasn't worth it. And although it would get you out of school, but, but, but, but, and equally, like, like petrol in our cars, you know, that, that was genuinely, I remember the, the smoke haze that was every day over Sydney. So, on some things, you know, we, we've demonstrated capacity to solve these problems if we act collectively. The problem is the things that are in everyone's interest collectively are often not in everyone's interests individually. And so, there'll always be particular stakeholders who will have a reason why, oh, that doesn't suit me. And so, it's so easy to, to, to stop change. And you do need a certain level of courage to continue. And sometimes you'll, you'll go, you know, two steps forward and one step back, but at least that's one step forward. And then you just got to keep, keep going. I mean, we, I remember when I was in government, we had an abortive attempt with a thing called the design and, and place State Environmental Planning Policy, which was basically we wanted to start the design principle. Like, our cities actually, when you look at it respectfully, aren't designed by architects. Architects come in right at the end. They're actually designed by land surveyors who have no design training whatsoever. And we just said, well, why don't we start with country? Because we'd listened to some Aboriginal planners who had told us there's incredible things, there's incredible knowledge that no one's actually bothered to ask many Aboriginal Elders about land, about song lines, about, about the country itself. And to start with an understanding of that knowledge, well, why wouldn't we? But that, that particular reform proved too difficult to get over the across the line, but there are some elements of that that, that did happen. And inevitably, it set a course that ultimately those changes will come to pass. But what one thing that we tried to do was ensure that in new subdivisions in Western Sydney, for example, where we know that a non-reflective roof will actually increase internal temperatures by about 10° in summer, like 10°. And so, in other words, it'll require really expensive mechanical ventilation to deal with that problem in households struggling with cost of living. So, if you just made the roofs a light colour, you would save a huge amount of energy. But the property developer stakeholders were, oh, no, we couldn't possibly do that because people don't want light coloured roofs. I'm like, well, that's just silly. But nevertheless, that change wasn't made.  

Back to the cultural question, it's a cultural thing. In Victoria, they've done it, so we can do it. Yeah, well, that's, I was going to come back to you because at this point you said leadership before, and I'm wondering in your mind then what unlocks us from this, I'm going to call it an impasse, but Rob's given me hope. So, what unlocks us from this moment where it's too big a problem, I can't do anything? What do you think? What is the research actually telling us?  

So, I think this, like, the, the amount of people signing up for these events tells you that people realise this is what we should be doing. We see interest from our PhD students coming in, saying, I want to do research in urban, sustainable urban development, green infrastructure, because the younger generation knows this is where it's going, this is what we should be doing. So, there's a big push coming. But I think collectively you have a stronger voice if we can all be saying the same stories, that leadership voice gets stronger. The research, I mean, you called out the benefits, I've got, I think, one of our science friends is here and he often says the research shows it's too good to be true. Like, if you know how good nature is, you would not believe it. Yeah, like, it's too good to be true. But we've, we've neglected that, so we need to be saying these stories more, piloting things, showing, and then pushing collectively for the policies and for the leadership to, to make the right decisions to do this. If we don't do it now, fast forward 10 years from here, nobody of us would want, want to live in Sydney or any city for that matter. Yeah, so there is a, a question of pace. We need to pick up the pace. We've got to find the structure to allow us to do that. That's what I'm sort of picking up from the conversation.  

Remy, I'm going to come to you. You're checking your emails. No, Remy, oh, you're making notes. Sorry. There you go. I, I knew you were. So, we're sort of talking about this from a, from, I guess, a culture meets politics and leadership point of view. From the UN's point of view, what is, what would you say was the biggest priority in the green infrastructure space? Just give me one that is probably top of the pile for the priorities from the UN's perspective.  

Well, from, from us, I think the word has been said, what we call nature-based solutions. So, whatever solutions we are bringing in cities, if they are nature-driven, nature-oriented, for instance, let's say we are, we are bringing some, because I would like to bring these elements of green, grey, and blue infrastructure, when you have this blend all the time, because when you look at the grey infrastructure, usually the, the green element is very, very sometimes insignificant. So, if you say in a tender in a city or something like that, that any infrastructure in a city should have at least 30%, at least 30%, because, you know, we use that in many of our standards and guidelines, of green, that would actually set up what we discussed earlier in terms of policy, regulations, and enforceable, because you have a threshold and that can be measured. The same way when you talk about, we mentioned the managing drainage or stormwater, because if permeable space, you know, pathways, or, you know, all these spaces had to be made more, create spaces for blending the blue and then the green, it's important. So, for us, nature-based solutions are key. And it's also one of the tools that you use for climate management. I'm saying management because we can talk about resilience, adaptation, and other measures. So, nature is really important. And as I mentioned earlier, when you look at the sustainable development goals, they have been prioritized. They are all over those 17 goals. So, it's very clear that for us there's no just one but several entry points that we use to actually bring that element of planet, people, and places together. And I have other Ps that I will be, you know, coming, you know, adding to these Ps to, to demonstrate how, what Germain was talking about, the ecosystem that we are working with. But don’t be depressed, there are many, many good examples out there.  

There are many possible solutions. There are many things we can do in our own capacity. Doesn't matter who you are, at city level, at, in our homes, you know, in our global engagement when we have a voice like this one, you can carry. So, there are so many things. I know we're going to get there, but let's not get depressed, let's get excited rather that there is a consciousness. Yeah, that is around. Applause for that. I think that's worth it. And can I just point out, Remy, that you are here wearing the SDG goals pin and Rob, which has all the colours there for the goals. So, I'm going to change the tone a little bit here for a second, because we've talked about policy, we've talked about some of the hurdles.  

I want to kind of just flip the script a bit, and one thing that you said, Rob, when we were speaking at some point earlier, you brought in the idea of beauty. Now, here's the poet-politician moment for you, okay? I'm setting you up here. I really want to understand why and how we should talk about beauty in this context. It's not something we tend to talk about. But it was only post-politics that I sort of reflected on the things that mattered to me, and I realised I care about beautiful things. I love trees. It's just something when I see a tree knocked over, I just don't like that, and I imagine that's something that many people identify with. But I think it's funny with beauty. It's very hard to measure; you know it when you see it. And I think it's harder to tell what it is than it is to say what it isn't. Beauty in architecture can be monumental, martial, magisterial, or modern. One of my favourite bits of architecture in the city is the mort. It can be quite morbid, but what they share is something that is organic. It is something that's warm, or there's fenestration, or there's something tangible or tactile. The opposite of that, inhuman or nonhuman, is very hard to be beautiful. And so I think there's something in that. Remember, it is one of those things we can measure everything except the things that matter.

There's a fellow called William Morris who was an architect and an interior designer in Britain. He was the sort of parent of the arts and craft style. He once said, "If you're looking for a golden rule, this is it: when you're acquiring anything, ask yourself, is it useful, and do you consider it beautiful?" If we're asking that question in modern Australia, the questions are probably, is it big, and is it cheap? And I'm as guilty as anyone. When my wife sends me to Aldi to get some milk, I'll come back with an air compressor, not because I need a compressor. I wouldn't know how to use it, and I don't know what I'd use it for anyway, but gosh, it was a good deal. So, we're all infected a bit by this materialism, seeing preciousness not in the beauty or the utility of things, but in the materialistic value.  

Beauty is still something that's innate to us and drives us. Interestingly, you look at environments that attract people, and they're beautiful places. The secret of placemaking seems to me to be creating something beautiful, and people will be attracted to it. That's the secret sauce. If you can find that kind of beauty that you're describing, people will love it, come to it, and feel responsible for it, which breeds sustainability and longevity. When we think about spending money at the front of a project on something which might make it more attractive, both metaphorically and literally, there's a long sort of ripple effect that includes ownership and long-term engagement. The poet John Ruskin once said that to be beautiful, something has to be true. This idea of authenticity is crucial. There's beauty in something that is not pretending to be something other than what it is. That humanity and the ideas of something organic hold beauty because it seems to be living in some sense. Let's throw to Jermaine. I know you're going to answer the organic question and tell us how gorgeous it is. In one of our previous conversations, you brought up the idea of love. I signed up for this panel thinking it's all about sustainability and infrastructure.  

Now we've got this whole sort of poetry coming out of the panel here, which I'm really enjoying. But love, what do you mean? How does that figure? Dostoyevsky said beauty will save the world. In Sydney, there's a beautiful example of that called the Sydney Opera House. It cost seven times the intended budget but has now paid for itself many times over. If you put beauty, authenticity, and natural design into something, that's what you get. Now talking about love, because it's just you and me here, go for it. I must say you look very nice tonight. Thank you, you look lovely too. Okay, so this is the essence of why I do what I do. It is my belief that we see so much destruction out there of nature, which is really destruction of ourselves, because we don't love nature enough, and arguably we don't love ourselves enough either. So, there's two big problems here. But hang on, hang on, what does the audience think about that? Do we love ourselves enough? Do we love nature enough? In your minds, you're asking the question, which is the obvious follow-on: how can I find a way to love nature more and therefore love myself more? Is this the kind of logic we're talking about? Is this where we're going? Yeah, yeah. I'm just smiling because you know the job. There's that growing conversation about the fact that we humans are too many on this planet and we're cancerous. That's bad. I mean, there's no sports team that has won any type of tournament by starting by saying, we're a bunch of losers. It doesn't work this way, right?  

So, now back to love. Why we see so much destruction of nature in the world is because we don't love it enough. We don't love it enough because we don't value it enough, because we don't understand it enough, because we don't experience it enough, and therefore we are disconnected from that web of life. Why do we do all the crazy things that we do for our families? Because all those boxes are ticked. Now, the rest of the living world is just extended family, just a few more generations ago. So that's why I bring nature into the city, because I want people to experience nature more where they are. Not everybody is attuned to going outdoors and reconnecting. That's important. Can I throw to Remy at this point? I love where this is going. Remy, with your UN and community hat on, can you think of an example of the kind of thing that Germain's talking about, where a commitment to something at a community level has led to something beautiful? Yeah, well, there are several around us.

I think this issue of experiencing and maybe appreciating what is there and doing a bit more of that in several places might be one way. But if you just look at Botanic Gardens, for instance, you have a few in some cities, but you need more, you know, in a city like Sydney. I don't know if there's a plan to create more Botanic Gardens as the city grows, or you know, at that level. So these are some of the places where we can reconnect and people who visit. And we do that in schools. We take kids to Botanic Gardens, to the zoo, to these places to get them to reconnect because they start appreciating. So the idea here is to get the younger generation, the most younger ones, to get interested because they are the future. So that would be my suggestion: how do we get the kids to start learning the importance of green in the environment where they will be living, where they live, so that it becomes part of their habit, their behavior to break out that the issue we started with, the culture, so that we don't discover we don't try to unlearn and relearn later so that it becomes part of our behavior that this is just normal, we have to be able to bring nature anytime, every time, all the time.

Perfect. I mean, I think I was going to ask all of you. I'm going to ask all of you just, we're starting to run out of time. Actually, I know we're only really getting going, but that sounds to me like a perfect, the question was what's the one thing you would ask the audience to leave the room and do today or tomorrow to bring on the green infrastructure Revolution that we're talking about. So I'm hearing from Remy that I'm pointing down here to the monitor that Greening School Playgrounds and places like that for our Juniors is the right place to start. Let education start to play that role from a very young age.

Yeah, so the conversation starts early, yes. Start schools at home, getting them involved, appreciating the plants, especially native plants, the ones that and also the ones that have benefits like the ones that absorb more CO2, for instance, these are the things that we should be aware of and be able to plant them because we know that type of benefit. The ones that bring some elements of health that have medicinal values, that have some fruits or some element, all those things we have that element of culture awareness and knowing and earlier enough the better. Getting your hands in the dirt. Rob, what's your one suggestion for people, the one thing that you would like people to do when they leave the room tonight, the literally first thing comes to my head: go for a walk or you get a Mobility Scooter, just go and just go and have a have a bit of a walk. 88% of our health budget, which is about 30% of the overall budget, is spent treating non-communicable diseases, of which the biggest single one is type two diabetes. There are more than 2 and a half million Australians with that condition, and for most people, it's preventable if we just had environments where it was easier for people to just be a bit more active.  

I'd like to bounce off what you were saying, Remy. I think everyone in this room, and I think everyone at some stage in their life – for most of us, I think it was when we were kids – we've experienced the wonder and awe of nature. It's like, "Wow!" To tie back to what you were saying, it's beautiful and transcends our rational mind, connecting directly to our hearts. To me, this is why urban greening is so important: it allows people to experience that fundamental shift we need to operate as a species and live in harmony on this planet. We often talk about needing to save the planet, but the planet doesn't need to be saved – it needs to be loved.

I love this question because I once made my students do this. So, here's a challenge to everybody: if you leave here, please go hug a tree. Love the tree, hug the tree, and even better, take a selfie while you hug the tree. Post it and tag us. If people ask you why, you can explain why nature is so valuable and important, why this tree is keeping us all alive, and help spread the message. Be a leader in that way.

We've got time for just maybe two, possibly three, questions from our beautiful audience here. We've got some roaming mics – one there and one over there. Oh my goodness, hands are shooting up all over the place. Let's go to this person here with the beautiful headscarf on. If I could just ask you to keep the question brief.

I loved what you said, Remy, and I agree with you. Community gardens in suburbs for children, herbs, and fruit trees are great. Also, when children see the Balmoral trees being poisoned, they should get a bit more punishment than they do.

Great comment. Let's go. You had your hand up very quickly there in the second row, with the dark black shirt. Here comes a microphone.  

Designing cities around water – twice the amount of rain falls on Sydney than we actually draw out of Warragamba. If we didn't have Warragamba and needed to drink our own rain, what would that look like? What does a city look like that's designed around water?

I'll start. We had to look at this question while considering the new city around the new Western Sydney airport and how to deal with water flow around South Creek, which is that big corridor. The best advice was to re-establish a chain of ponds, recognizing what was there before and seeking to recreate that. We also need to start properly recycling water rather than just generating it. We're going to have to get used to the idea that yes, we're going to drink our pee – we do it every day anyway, because ultimately, we've got the same amount of water in this biosphere as we've always had. It's all recycled. Piping sewer and wastewater from far western Sydney out to the ocean is just a silly idea now.

Does anyone else want to tackle that question? Jay?

Yes, I was going to answer from a theoretical perspective. It doesn't work ideally. A city should operate in the same way an ecosystem works, dealing with the amount of rain that falls there and not trying to do things beyond what sunlight and rain afford. A city in itself isn't a sustainable model, but there are ways to make it better. It's hard, but there are plenty of good initiatives to try to make buildings water-positive, for example. It's a tough task, but doable in bits.

Right, so it's a double-edged answer: it's really hard, but we can do parts of it. Let's go to the back of the room, the gentleman with his hand up and the puffy vest.

I have a housing question. Urban sprawl in Western Sydney isn't sustainable or desirable in combating the housing crisis, with low canopy cover, dark roofs, and car dependency. The state government is moving towards more infill development and increasing density, as we've seen with the new TODP. Greening cities isn't a new concept; we have Canberra from the Garden City movement of the 20th century. One downfall of it is its lack of density, seen as undesirable. How do we manage density in green cities?

First, is green infrastructure a new idea? Short answer: no.

Everyone shaking their heads, so no, it's not a new idea. The Garden City movement was one of the early examples. The Griffins did it in Castlecrag, wanting everyone to live in the bush. The mid-century moderns on the lower North Shore did the nuts-and-berries architecture, living with the bush without digging it up. We do have precedents, but clearly, we haven't been listening to them. The second part of the question is the density question. How do we reconcile green with density? These are both necessary.

I'll take a shot. Super high density is never ultimately sustainable due to too many challenges and too much energy use over time. Strata titling works well with a 1960s-style six-pack of six apartments, but once you have 500 or 1,000 apartments, it becomes a new form of governance entirely. I worry about what will happen in 50 years when some of these super-dense places need to be rebuilt. Of course, we've got a housing crisis and need a supply-side solution, but we can't ignore demand. We're not looking at the tax incentives that turn housing into a commodity. We need to stop incentivizing people who already have houses to buy more until everyone who wants a house has one. Then we can incentivize buying more houses.

Green infrastructure is a network, an interconnected system. Like how we plan freeways and highways, green should be throughout cities. The denser we go, the more we need green infrastructure to sustain human life. It's not just about housing; it's about rethinking the entire process from materials, construction, architecture, and planning.

Round of applause for that. Remy, what do you think about reconciling density with green infrastructure?

It's not one or the other; they can be done together. There's no fixed threshold for density; it's context-specific. For us, city or urban development should follow principles like compactness, connectivity, and integration. Cities should be compact, connected through green or blue infrastructure, and integrated. Singapore is a great example – highly dense yet highly green. So, they are not in competition; it's doable.

On the housing question, of course, affordability is a perennial issue in Australia. We need to make housing greener, considering elements like the roof that Rob mentioned. Greening has a cost, but the cost-benefit is in favor of nature.

Great, that last bit was for the accountants in the room. Cost-benefit analysis looks really good. Everyone else is saying we can do it together. Density and green don't have to fight each other. They are a companion piece. They work in harmony if we're clever about bringing those things together at the outset. That's what I'm summarizing here. From an innovation perspective, there are plenty of solutions out there that add a lot of nature to the city without impacting housing or density. There are plenty of opportunities to make it happen if we allow it to happen.

When I talk about sustainability to students, I often say the science was in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. The science of sustainability was in the technology and engineering of sustainability – that was in the '90s and 2000s. So that leaves us back to the very beginning with the issue about sustainability that we haven't solved yet, which is the cultural side. And that's exactly where the panel went this evening. When you all opened up to that question, we had love, poetry, and all those very human responses. Rather than a technical conversation, we've ended up with a very human conversation, and that seems to be where the problems lie, but also where the opportunities are.

With that, we're going to draw this evening's proceedings to a close. I hope you leave the room thinking about your next action. Hopefully, outside at the bar, you can have a conversation with like-minded people, and maybe something will spark out of that. Wouldn't that be amazing? We'll be at the bar later on, so come and tap us on the shoulder if you want to chat. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. [Applause]

I would like to invite you up to the podium to say some thank yous. Then you can go, I will sit down. Thank you, Anthony. I've got the wonderful task of thanking some incredible people. This event has been in the making for quite some time. A lot of hours went into it. When we started, we asked the panel members to share something about themselves. Remember those questions? Something about yourself, your perspectives, how you think about things. We said it would be confidential, but I'm going to blabber it all out now. I fed this information to ChatGPT, like any responsible academic would, and asked ChatGPT to summarize the superpowers of our panelists.

So, a huge thank you and appreciation to our panelists for sharing their superpowers.  

Firstly, Rob, our Harmony Hero, who works his magic to create amazing cities where everything and everyone fits together perfectly. That can be a new LinkedIn status. Germain, our Nature Ninja, who brings nature back to the city, making urban life fresh and exciting. Remy, our Global City Wizard, who transforms cities all over the world, making them better places for everyone. Thanks, Remy. And our host, Anthony, the Design Guru, who puts the grand into architecture, turning his passion into wonderful city-changing designs. Thank you very much. A small gift for all of you. [Applause]

Remy, watch out for a package coming your way soon. Everybody is curious to know what's in your bags. It's really special, designed by students from the Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Building. I believe Rob has a matching gift on. A huge thank you to Jo Bosben, Dena Fam, and the incredible UTS team running at the back, who are keeping this event live and covering it globally. It's an honor to be part of this Global Game Changer series, and a salute to UTS management for investing in these conversations and global engagements. This is wonderful.  

To our audience, our enablers of the visions we shared tonight, thank you for turning up and engaging with 1,700 registrations. It gives us confidence that this is an important topic, and we need to take it forward. Green infrastructure matters. A special shout-out to our UTS friends in China, who gathered a crowd to watch the live stream. Thank you.  

In closing, I learned something from one of my students that turned out to be my favorite quote: "You should never underestimate the power of a small change." I challenge you all tonight to be part of this change, part of the Green Revolution. Every small act by every one of us can have a huge collective impact. Never underestimate the power of a small change. To bring it back to Anthony's first question, "Why are we not already greening our cities?" This is a call to all of you as well. Let's do better, and let's do it together. Thank you, UTS, thank you to the panel and our host, and thank you to the audience. Let the Green Revolution begin. Thank you.