Art duo Looty have been digitally repatriating artefacts such as the Rosetta Stone to their places of origin using a bevvy of tech, including Lidar 3D scanning, location-based augmented reality (AR), blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) technology. The art duo are ‘looting back’ stolen cultural artefacts from museums founded in the colonial era. It’s a clever but also very important project for raising awareness of the importance of repatriation of cultural property to their country or community of origin. Just days before this article came out, a ceremony held in the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge saw four spears taken by James Cook and Joseph Banks on 29 April 1770 permanently repatriated to the La Perouse Aboriginal Community.

As the AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → and Copyright court cases continue we are seeing AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → companies shift to direct licensing deals. If this trend continues ⟨  and it very likely will⟩ Style: italics there’s “… more risk of gatekeeping, as only the largest companies will be able to afford the licensing costs.” The recently launched Common Corpus public domain dataset for training large language models (LLMs) “… is an attempt to address these challenges by presenting a new way of contributing to the development of AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → as Commons.” It’s built on open data, “CC-licensed YouTube videos, 21 million digitized newspapers, and millions of books …” and “… reflects a vision of fostering a culture of openness and accessibility in AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → research.” To say I am excited about this endeavour is such an understatement!

Katie Notopoulos takes a funny look at how weird and out of place Meta AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → is in the Facebook and Instagram apps. Placing it in the search section is weird enough, but given how much data Meta has on all of us, its its suggested AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → prompts are strange ⟨  and often shallow⟩.

In a piece that is similar to Alex Bruns’ blog post in last week’s Reading list, Amanda Lotz has a piece on 360 that argues that social media and news are both in the attention business, and that attention was used to prop up their business models by selling advertising. As Lotz said, “The development of more effective and efficient advertising tools is what killed traditional newspaper operations, not the circulation of news on social media.” We know Meta is increasingly convinced news isn’t that important to its platforms. We also know that the News Bargaining CodeA scheme set up by the Australian Government to compell specific tech companies to negotiate payments to news organisations for news content on their platforms. didn’t address the core of the problem for journalism. And we know that journalism is good for democracy. But we also know that governments aren’t that interested in funding journalism. So the problem persists.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I am keen to get into the third edition of the arts sector-wide report on gender representation in the Australian art sector. This report also included First Nations representation for the first time. NAVA has a detailed news article about the report, and it was covered in a number of media outlets, including The Guardian.

A New Approach (ANA) also released an important report this past week: the latest report in The Big Picture series “… tracking the long-term trends in arts and cultural investment by all three levels of government in Australia, shining a light on how governments are supporting the creators, activities and institutions that connect communities.” This report notes that “… while government spending on arts and culture increased in 2021-22, it is still not keeping pace with population growth nor with our OECD peers. The scale of cultural funding by state and territory governments is now neck and neck with the federal government, while the local government share has decreased.”

I also haven’t read it yet, but the Oversight Board has put out a report on social media platforms and election content moderation. It notes, “… [2024 is an] historic year of elections, with the populations of at least 80 countries around the world set to participate, there has never been a more critical time for democracy, human rights, and open and fair societies.” Given the role social media plays in disseminating political material and hosting political discourse, the Oversight Board has released key lessons for social media platform operators which should be important reading.