Words: Donna Kelly

Planning is well under way for next month’s Words in Winter and Beck Lister will be hitting the couch on Sunday, August 27 with three guest artists.
Beck is an award-winning playwright, arts producer, MC and social worker. She is the co-artistic director of arts company Anvil Productions and the director of Education and Psychosocial Programs at Eating Disorders Victoria.
The Words in Winter event is the first of Anvil Production’s On The Couch with Beck Lister, an event happening every month from August, each show featuring two local guests and one “out of towner”. August’s guests are Adam Fawcett, Harmony Byrne and Alexandra Collier – with resident musician Douglas Lee Robertson.
“Adam Fawcett, pictured left, is a local playwright, a successful mid-career writer, living in Daylesford. He has a company, Lab Kelpie, and I am pretty excited to talk to Adam because he has a new play opening in November at Theatre Works in St Kilda. So it is a nice opportunity to chat about that.
“My second guest is local musician Harmony Byrne, centre, a beautiful young singer/songwriter who has a wonderful combination of soulful sound that is also grungy and thrashy. Harmony is a terrific woman and I saw her perform a few weeks ago at the Yandoit Cultural Centre.
“My third guest is a writer from Melbourne who has spent a lot of her working life in New York, Alexandra Collier, right. She has launched a book called Inconceivable, a memoir of her journey to have a child solo. She has worked as a playwright and writer for film and is very open and has a really great presence. Her book is beautiful and it was lovely to invite her to come up to Daylesford.”
Beck said the show was “part chat show, part therapy” with guests asked to speak about their art-making process. “There will also be the difficult questions about how do you go about making art when you feel flat or devoid of new ideas. Artists often talk about a low period and I want to know how they navigate that and start creating again, and how does their own life inform their arts practice?
“The artists have also been asked to read or sing or showcase a piece of their work and we also have music with Douglas Lee Robertson, who used to live in Daylesford and is pretty excited to be working on the show here.”
Beck, who lived in Daylesford about 15 years ago before moving to Melbourne and then north-west Queensland, and back to Daylesford a couple of years ago, said she was stoked to be a part of Words in Winter. She has two other shows in the festival including chatting about a book she co-wrote with her husband Tony Kelly, Growing Pineapples in the Outback, and a breakfast event, Future Women.
Link: www.wordsinwinter.com

Words: Donna Kelly

Gordon Legal has launched a ground-breaking defamation claim against
OpenAI’s ChatGPT on behalf of Hepburn Shire Council Mayor, Cr Brian Hood.
Gordon Legal alleges Cr Hood’s reputation was defamed by the ChatGPT AI,
which incorrectly identified him as an individual who faced charges related to a
foreign bribery scandal, rather than his actual role as the whistle-blower in the case.
Cr Hood previously worked for Note Printing Australia – a Reserve Bank of
Australia subsidiary – in the early 2000s, when he alerted authorities to officers of
NPA and another subsidiary, Securency, paying bribes to overseas agencies to win
contracts to print banknotes.

Cr Hood (pictured above) was not charged with any offences. Rather, he alerted the authorities to
the wrongdoing and was praised for his bravery in coming forward.
ChatGPT made several false statements when asked about Mr Hood’s
involvement in the Reserve Bank of Australia’s foreign bribery case. They included
that Cr Hood was accused of bribing officials in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam
between 1999 and 2005 and that he was sentenced to 30 months in prison after
pleading guilty to two counts of false accounting under the Corporations Act.
All of these statements are false. And Gordon Legal filed a Concerns Notice to
OpenAI on March 21 detailing the inaccuracy and demanding a rectification.
Cr Hood told The Local that one key objective with the claim was letting people
know that ChatGPT was not as secure or accurate as many believed.
“There is not much regulation or control around it. And the information coming
out of it has to be reliable. The really odd thing is that you can put in an enquiry and
it spits out five or six paragraphs and some are absolutely accurate, with names, times
and places all spot on, but then there are others which are false, complete garbage.
“That suggests it is going to certain sites to get the real information but where are
the garbage paragraphs coming from? Is it creating them itself? There is nowhere on
any site that suggests the sort of things I have been alleged to have done, nothing on
the record anywhere, so where is that coming from?
“It is a really weird mixture of fact and fiction and the average punter won’t know
which paragraph is right and which is wrong. It needs to be nipped in the bud. When
it is spitting out stuff that affects people’s reputations, or causes harm or doubt, that
is just wrong. You put garbage out there and some people will believe it.”