MIL-OSI Export

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Tanner, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Gender Studies, Monash University

The explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools has provoked both hopes and anxieties about the potential benefits and harms of this technology. In advanced economies, people are almost equally worried and optimistic about it.

This is perhaps unsurprising. AI consumes vast amounts of natural resources yet promises to save the planet. It may improve human efficiency and productivity, while putting millions out of work.

For many white-collar workers, AI use now seems non-optional. The messaging is clear – get on board or be left behind.

Amid this uncertainty and rapid technological uptake, concerned citizens have made efforts to resist AI. One form of AI resistance, aimed at sabotaging the functionality of AI large language models, is data poisoning. But how accessible is it to the everyday person? And what is at stake in its use?

What is AI resistance?

Acts of AI resistance range from social sanctions and boycotts, to strikes, protests, public outcry and lawsuits. Driving these acts are perceived threats to jobs, ethics, safety, democracy and sovereignty, and the environment.

AI is also described as an existential risk to creative industries, including music, fiction and film. In the United Kingdom, generative AI has been characterised as an “industrial scale theft” that threatens a £124.6 billion (A$237bn) creative sector and more than 2.4 million jobs.

People have long used civil disobedience to address social injustices. Famously, Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit at the back of a bus in Alabama led to a 13-month bus boycott by tens of thousands of Black residents. It only ended when racial segregation on public transport was deemed unconstitutional in the United States.

Acts of sabotage have also long been central to collective action against injustice. In fights for labour rights, workers have employed diverse tactics to reduce efficiency and productivity. This has ranged from hotel workers putting salt in sugar bowls to farm workers breaking machinery.

Data poisoning can be viewed as a modern version of these historic actions.

How does data poisoning work?

Data poisoning means deliberately inserting misleading, biased, or nonsensical content into the data AI models learn from, to make their outputs worse. Only 250 poisoned documents in a dataset could compromise outputs across AI models of any size.

There are various ways to poison data. Some require highly technical skills, others are accessible to anyone with an internet connection – if their text or images are used as training data.

Researchers have developed several data poisoning tools that exploit the vulnerabilities of AI models. Glaze and Nightshade enable artists to make poisoned visual images that can’t be used as training data. The tool CoProtector defends against the exploitation of open source code repositories like Github. Monash University and the Australian Federal Police have created Silverer, enabling social media users to doctor personal images to prevent them from being used in deepfakes.

But you don’t need a tool or advanced skills to affect AI. Simply creating websites with factitious information, making jokes in Reddit, feeding models their own outputs, or editing Wikipedia can poison data.

Data poisoning is commonly presented as a dangerous act perpetrated by “cyber criminals” or “malicious actors”. But what if it’s used to protect human rights?

Is data poisoning legal? Is it ethical?

Legal obligations related to data poisoning are often directed to AI developers and organisations. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act requires that appropriate measures are adopted to prevent and detect data poisoning.

The legal status of AI data poisoning by individual users is less clear. Criminal penalties may apply under US or UK computer fraud and misuse laws. Interference with an AI model would also likely breach the terms of service of AI companies.

If AI data poisoning is unlawful, questions could still be asked about its ethical status. Philosophers have long recognised that civil disobedience can be justifiable in circumstances where legally sanctioned practices produce serious injustice.

If AI companies are operating with state approval in ways that impact citizens’ rights to privacy, copyright, safe and secure work, quality education, social and sexual safety, data poisoning may constitute ethical civil disobedience.

For philosopher John Rawls, “[civil disobedience] is one of the stabilising devices of a constitutional system, although by definition an illegal one”.

If the intention is to prevent mass unemployment, preserve the integrity of elections, and protect against social harms (suicide, child abuse, increased human isolation, loss of human creativity and environmental degradation), data poisoning could align with the principles of justice that underpin democratic social institutions.

A significant problem with data poisoning is that even if models become compromised – and outputs grow inconsistent, misleading, or nonsensical – users overly trust AI systems. Data poisoning then could contribute to harms it seeks to resist, amplifying the inaccuracy of systems humans are increasingly relying on, irrespective of their quality and effects.

Data poisoning is not simply an immoral cyber crime. It can be an ethically complex strategy to address social injustices. AI development needs to be of collective benefit and aligned with public values and interests. If AI company employees are asking “Are we the baddies?”, history may prove that in some cases data poisoners are on the side of good.

– ref. In the face of rampant AI, is ‘data poisoning’ a new form of civil disobedience? – https://theconversation.com/in-the-face-of-rampant-ai-is-data-poisoning-a-new-form-of-civil-disobedience-280146

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/in-the-face-of-rampant-ai-is-data-poisoning-a-new-form-of-civil-disobedience-280146/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nanda Jarosz, Researcher, Environmental Philosophy, University of Sydney

In 1989, environmentalist Bill McKibben announced to the world that nature was dead. Due to the rapid rate and scale of anthropogenic climate change, he argued, the idea of nature as an entity independent of human activity had become obsolete.

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Review: Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? – Richard King (Monash University Publishing)

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A new book by Richard King, Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet?, conducts a postmortem on this idea of “nature”. And it describes a dangerous ideology that has taken root at the heart of the environmental movement.

King considers the moral, political, social and economic implications of a particular way of attempting to solve climate change, known as the “technofix”. This mindset looks for “a technological solution to tackle a social or environmental issue”.

We are, King suggests, entering “a period in which mitigation and adaptation are giving way to re-engineering”. As the consequences of climate change become harder to ignore and the environmental and moral costs of inaction become too high, “radical interventions such as geoengineering and de-extinction are taking root in the imaginations of thought leaders and policymakers across the globe”.

But solutions that come in the guise of technological progress may harbour dangers to the planet that we can’t fully fathom or control.

Brave New Wild examines proposals involving nuclear power, geoengineering, de-extinction approaches to conservation, nanotechnologies capable of manipulating matter at a molecular level, smart technologies and interplanetary colonisation. It outlines potentially terrifying scenarios associated with the technofix mindset.

King describes, for example, the risks that come with developments in nanotechnology. Billions of self-fuelling and self-replicating nanomachines deployed to clean up an oil slick could run out of control and lead to an environmental disaster of planetary scale:

Given that every new nanite created would need to consume some of the Earth’s resources to use as fuel or source material, the resulting army could reduce the biosphere to dust within a matter of days. The grey goo would consume the world.

It has also been suggested that mining the moon “will be feasible by the end of the decade”. King notes that some see this as a positive scenario, because the moon is uninhabited and a “barren, airless wasteland”. But he points out there are many potential hazards to such work: lunar dust pollution, the proliferation of space junk and debris, and risks to workers, including mental health problems, physical disabilities, exploitation and death.

Anthropocene thinking and moral hazards

King grounds his critique of the “technofix” in an analysis of the concept of the Anthropocene: a period when human activity is altering the conditions of life on a planetary scale and leaving perceptible traces in the geological record.

This development, King argues, “places humanity at the centre of the Earth story, suggesting that whatever challenges the planet faces will need to be solved by Homo sapiens, the species whose destructiveness is inseparable from its genius”.

Paired with the concept of the “death of nature”, Anthropocene thinking is a deadly precursor to the types of technological interventions that, King argues, will fundamentally change humanity’s relationship to the environment.

The problem is not only that technology can escape human control, with catastrophic consequences. Accepting a perspective that subjugates the non-human world to purely human ends has moral and ethical implications.

“The Anthropocene narrative,” King writes, “tends to encourage a view of nature as infinitely malleable – something that can and should be shaped by human hands, to human ends – and this perspective is likely to reproduce the arrogance and lack of principled reflection that placed us in this situation in the first place.”

Removing the separation between human and non-human nature actually makes it easier to exploit the natural environment, including other humans. This mindset – which King terms “ecomodernism” – “repeats the error of industrial capitalism, and even modernity itself, in treating the environment as an abstract entity that can be endlessly manipulated.”

Responsibility towards nature

In response to the ecomodernist mindset, which “effectively abolishes nature as a category distinct from humanity by making everything humans do effectively identical with it”, Brave New Wild suggests an alternative: what King terms “ecohumanism”.

He argues that nature is at once an idea and a phenomenological reality. “Human beings in short, are always part of and always apart from the natural world: nature defines us, and we define nature.”

This view may appear to be the same as that taken by proponents of the technofix. For King, however, our idea of nature actively shapes our experience of reality: “our ability to recognise ourselves as animals marks us out from all the other animals, while the suite of powers (intellectual, technological) from which that self-recognition is inseparable imposes upon us certain responsibilities – to ourselves and to parental nature.”

In the act of recognising that nature is created through human thought, we can realise that it should not be used purely for human gain. We must act with a sense of responsibility towards it.

King proposes an embodied approach to technological solutions to the problem of anthropogenic climate change. He argues that modern science must move away from a perspective of mastery over nature, towards “an attitude of care”.

The first level of interaction with nature should not be mediated through logic or distant observation. It should be phenomenological: at the level of lived experience. It should involve what King calls a “more holistic way of being”. This is based on a consideration of all aspects of what it means to be human and the implications of potential solutions for “conscious, subjective, immediate experience”.

One way to achieve this goal is by engaging with the democratic, creative and imaginative aspects of our humanity. King suggests decentralising political and technological control “as far as possible to individual human beings”. He proposes developing community through political policies such as universal basic income and “bringing energy and other utilities into public ownership”.

He also points to sources of inspiration in creative and imaginative exercises, such as reading nature writing, or other activities that help to elicit what he calls “human flourishing”. The point, for King, is to revitalise a sense of “conviviality” through a communal understanding of what it means to be human.

Radical humility

Brave New Wild advocates an ethical sense of human agency. It offers an accessible point of departure for many ideas circulating in environmental philosophy.

But while it is true that human beings are part of nature and should treat it respectfully, it is also true that “nature” is not limited to human perception or ideas. Human beings employ reason and sensory perception to make sense of the world, but the universe itself is not rational or reasonable.

Despite advances in science and technology, nature exists beyond the powers of human comprehension, in both a material and conceptual sense. As much as scientists can engineer life, they do not know how life in the universe started or how it will end.

What King does not explain is how to cultivate ecohumanism among those who view science and technology as providing ready solutions to the messy realities of our ecological existence. To foster the embodied responsibility that his interventions demand, we must first appreciate nature as a force that unsettles our claims to knowledge and mastery.

One way of doing this is through the aesthetic appreciation of the sublime. An experience that embraces wonder and destruction, the sublime offers a view of nature on its own terms. It compels us to experience nature as fundamentally incomprehensible. It directly challenges the hubris of a “technofix” approach.

In a world of high-tech maps and data-driven solutions, the sublime offers a glimpse of nature as it exists independently of us. The sense of awe might inspire a radical humility. It might move us away from trying to fix the planet, and towards caring for it as a source of infinite possibility.

– ref. Searching for a ‘technofix’ to climate change has many dangers. Could radical humility save the planet? – https://theconversation.com/searching-for-a-technofix-to-climate-change-has-many-dangers-could-radical-humility-save-the-planet-276046

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/searching-for-a-technofix-to-climate-change-has-many-dangers-could-radical-humility-save-the-planet-276046/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Hale, Senior Lecturer in English and Writing (children’s literature), University of New England

Isn’t it funny
How a Bear likes honey
Buzz buzz
I wonder why he does

Just over a century ago, the satirical writer and playwright A.A. Milne, suffering from the after-effects of fighting in the trenches of World War I, started writing some poems for his only child, Christopher Robin.

They were published in a collection, When We Were Very Young and they caused a literary sensation for a reading public looking for comfort in difficult times.

Two years later, Milne followed up with the stories of the Hundred Acre Wood in his book Winnie-the-Pooh, based on the tangle of scrub and trees at the bottom of his garden and populated by Christopher Robin’s toys.

Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga and Roo, and Owl, each distinctive characters in their own right, chatted and played, going on adventures, solving problems, presided over by Christopher Robin, the wise child who knows what to do.

Not every critic loved it: “Tonstant Reader fwowed up” wrote the acerbic Dorothy Parker in her New Yorker Constant Reader column. She found the stories saccharine and cloying. But for those who enjoyed the simple humour, cameraderie and warmth of the stories, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends became part of the children’s literary canon. And so they have remained to this day.

Winnie-the-Pooh has been translated into over 50 languages, including Bengali, Swedish, Polish and Latin (with the wonderful Winnie Ille Pu). In Poland, a Warsaw street, Ulica Kubusia Puchatka, was named after Winnie-the-Pooh by the children of the city.

In 1961, Disney acquired the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, resulting in a popular television cartoon and merchandising. In China, in 2018, a film version of Winnie-the-Pooh was banned after internet memes compared his gentle laziness to the President, Xi Jinping. More than 20 million copies of the books have been sold worldwide.

Winnie-the-Pooh contains a perfect mixture of sweetness and sharp observation, shifting between light and dark, between funny and tragi-comic. The stories of Pooh and his friends, each one flawed but also delightful, demonstrate the ups and downs of life, held in a delicate and optimistic balance.

Take, for instance, the depressive toy donkey, Eeyore, continually miserable yet somehow contented in his misery, bouncy toy tiger, Tigger, causing mayhem with every move, or timid Piglet, Pooh’s best friend. All (along with Pooh) have problems that are solved with one another’s help and particularly with the help of the boy-hero, Christopher Robin. Problems occur, are solved, and life carries on.

A romance of community

The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are what we might think of as a romance of community. The inhabitants of the 100 Acre Wood show resilience and resourcefulness in dealing with difficulties, largely because they deal with them together.

They are also pastoral, set in a comfortable and nonthreatening rural place, offering readers (often weary urbanites) a holiday from their busy lives. And as such, they allow us to gently contemplate what makes life tick, and what makes life worth living.

This philosophical streak runs through all Milne’s work for children: in his follow-up to Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner (1928), and his second collection of poems, Now We Are Six (1927). In 1929 he adapted another children’s classic, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, for the stage. Also a pastoral, featuring anthropomorphised animals rather than toys, it promoted the English countryside as a space for gentle reflection on the good life and friendship.

The Wind in the Willows has a wild quality. Such wildness does not impinge greatly in the Pooh stories: the characters are toys rather than animals and the god-figure is Christopher Robin.

Asked, for instance, to help resolve a squabble between Eeyore and Tigger, after Tigger’s loud sneeze has frightened Eeyore into falling into the river, Christopher Robin concludes: “Well, … I think – I think we all ought to play Poohsticks”. This is a simple game in which players drop sticks on the upstream side of a bridge over running water and wait to see which one emerges first. (See: How to Play Pooh Sticks)

Living in the moment

Why is Winnie-the-Pooh called Winnie-the-Pooh? The name Winnie comes from a North American black bear at the London Zoo, which was brought to Britain from Winnipeg, Canada. Like many London children, Christopher Robin was taken to the London zoo to see the animals, and he shortened the name Winnipeg to “Winnie”. “Pooh,” on the other hand, came from a swan, encountered on a family holiday. This mixture of inside-joke and idiosyncratic names created by a very young child adds to the book’s whimsy.

In their appeal to the good life and emphasis on friendship and community, these books have struck a chord with readers well beyond the nursery. Best known in this vein is Benjamin Hoff’s book The Tao of Pooh, a philosophical work that connects the behaviour of Pooh and friends with the principles of Daoism, which emphasise the importance of simplicity, naturalness and effortlessness.

In this regard, the innocent everyman Pooh exemplifies the ability to live in the present moment, and to live a life of simple “being”.

As such, he is the valuable sounding-board for the other characters, beset by life difficulties and behavioural dysfunction: the hyperactive Tigger, the depressive Eeyore, anxious Piglet, busy Rabbit and so-on. He offers solutions to their problem, without criticising them, in doing so providing stability for them and for readers.

Certainly, when one visits the 100 Acre Wood, one is aware of entering a place of calm, of smallness, a place attuned to nature where the oddities of human character and behaviour are distilled into small, funny, calming stories. It is a world close to beauty, but also tolerant of imperfection.

According to Daoism, the secret of life lies in accepting things according to their true nature, neither blaming nor praising.

What of Christopher?

It helps, too, that Pooh Corner is visually lovely: the illustrations by E.H. Shephard present Pooh and friends as cute and appealing, while remaining faithful to the toys that inspired them.

Pictures such as one where Pooh and Piglet climb a gate together show the odd-couple balance of their friendship – brave Pooh, fearful Piglet – trusting one another in difficult circumstances.

Christopher Robin Milne had a somewhat difficult time as a child thrust into the spotlight when the books found fame. It is hard enough having one’s childish cuteness paraded around family and friends; harder still when one’s reputation precedes one.

In adult life, Christopher Robin owned a successful bookshop and before he died in 1996, he did reach a measure of acceptance of his father’s work. In 2001, Disney Corporation paid a large sum of money to Milne’s estate and other rights holders of Winnie-the-Pooh. His wife Lesley and daughter Clare decided the money should be used to fund a charity supporting people with disabilities. The Clare Milne Trust has been in operation since 1999.

2026 will be a year of busy celebration for Winnie-the-Pooh. Disney, unsurprisingly, will launch new merchandise. An academic conference on 100 years of the 100 acres will be held at the University of Cambridge.

For the rest of us, it may be time to dig out our childhood copies of Milne’s books, to spend a little time with old friends from these best of old stories, hanging out in the 100 Acre Wood, doing not very much and thinking a little about life.

– ref. Friendship, honey and the simple life: 100 years of Winnie-the-Pooh – https://theconversation.com/friendship-honey-and-the-simple-life-100-years-of-winnie-the-pooh-276175

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/friendship-honey-and-the-simple-life-100-years-of-winnie-the-pooh-276175/