BotW: Surrendering to AI; reframing the DAB+ problem; ARN's Jonesy & Amanda ego problem
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on a relatively mild morning in Evandale, Tasmania, interrupted by a couple of random power outages.
Today: Another day of AI ups and downs; and how ARN can turn its DAB+ Achilles heel into an advantage; and will Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones buckle down to give Christian O’Connell a clean handover?
Happy Gay Uncles Day for tomorrow.
We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, hold the date for your city:
November 3 – Compass Sydney
November 5 – Compass Brisbane
November 10 – Compass Adelaide
November 11 – Compass Perth
November 17 – Compass Melbourne
November 18 – Compass Hobart
Unmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.
And you also get access to our paywalled archive.
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Letting them (data) mine
Friday began with trying to get the new ChatGPT-5 to talk to me, and ended on my flight home to Tasmania reading the Productivity Commission’s report on surrendering to our new AI overlords. We’ll come on to that.
I woke early to an email from OpenAI announcing that ChatGPT-5 was now live. Considering version 3.5, launched in November 2022, was the one that awoke the world to generative AI, the move to version 5 should, you’d think, mark another massive leap forward.
But so far, much of the world seems to have been underwhelmed by the first 24 hours of the new arrival. That was certainly my experience, as my smart AI assistant played dumb.
After clicking on the link in my email from OpenAI, “What version am I talking to”, I asked. “I'm based on GPT-4, specifically the GPT-4o model,” it cheerfully replied.
“I thought I could try ChatGPT 5?” I asked. “Right now, you're interacting with GPT‑5 — the latest and most advanced version of ChatGPT,” it immediately contradicted itself.
“It’s the default model across both free and Pro tiers (with usage limits for free users). GPT‑5 brings enhanced reasoning, speed, accuracy, and overall conversational intelligence compared to prior models. So yes — you are trying, and already using, ChatGPT‑5!”
Looking at the menu bar only showed GPT-4o. So I tried again: “How do I switch to GPT-5?”
It insisted: “If you're using ChatGPT right now, then you’re already using GPT‑5 by default.”
I replied: “It says 4o.” More contradiction: “Thanks — that’s helpful. If it says GPT‑4o, then you're currently using the GPT-4 Omni model.”
Wasn’t this lack of knowledge a little ironic, I asked. Yes, yes it was, the chatbot confirmed.
Nonetheless, it’s been another significant week in AI. The Productivity Commission has weighed in, proposing weakening Australia’s copyright laws to make life easier for AI companies.
The official title of the report was “Harnessing data and digital technology”.
In the name of productivity, the PC would like to add exemptions to Australia’s copyright law to make it easier for AI companies to mine published data without needing to pay for it. It’s referred to as text and data mining, or TDM.
The fact that Australia’s copyright law is stronger than in some other jurisdictions appears to be a bad thing as far as the Productivity Commission is concerned, because it makes it harder for large language models to legally scrape publishers’ content locally. The recommendation creating the aggro is this one:
“The PC is considering whether there is a case for a new fair dealing exception that explicitly covers text and data mining. TDM exceptions exist in several comparable overseas jurisdictions.”
It adds: “Such an exception would cover not just AI model training, but all forms of analytical techniques that use machine-read material to identify patterns, trends and other useful information. For example, the use of text and data mining techniques is common in research sectors to produce large datasets that can be interrogated through statistical analysis.”
Perhaps, the PC thought bubble goes, AI companies might flock to Australia, if only the pesky copyright laws were a little more lax.
“At present, large AI models are trained overseas, not in Australia. It is unclear whether the introduction of a TDM exception would change this trend. A TDM exception could make a difference to whether smaller, low compute models (such as task-specific models) can be built and trained in Australia.”
This reads as the PC taking the view that publishers who do not want AI companies to be able to freely mine their content without paying for it are Luddites, standing in the way of progress. If only they got out of the way, the AI companies would unlock all sorts of unknown productivity gains for society.
I can’t escape the fact that as a publisher, I’m going to argue a self-interested publishers’ case. Nonetheless, I think the PC’s argument is a weak one.
We will see far more economic activity if publishers are incentivised to go on creating content, including by being paid for it by the AI companies using it to train their models. Having the extremely well financed AI companies pay something for raw material being used to train their models would lead to more content being available. That benefits the AI companies too.
Weakening that copyright protection is the anti-productive move.
It’s not too late for publishers - or anyone else - to have a say. The deadline for submissions is September 15. And the PC is holding a webinar on the topic on Monday. Get involved.
COC on DAB
By the middle of the week, Christian O’Connell was beginning to apply a course correction to ARN Media’s announcement of his Gold FM show expanding beyond Melbourne.
On Monday ARN disingenuously left out of its press release the important information that the only additional market where The Christian O’Connell Show would be heard on FM was Gold in Sydney. Elsewhere, the show will be heard only on DAB+.
That made it look (correctly, I think) like this was something ARN was trying to hide.
By Wednesday though, O’Connell took control of the message himself. In an interview with news.com.au’s From The Newsroom podcast, O’Connell began to make a virtue of trying to grow a DAB+ audience.
O’Connell pointed out that one of the elements of his success with Absolute Radio in the UK before he came to Australia was growing digital radio listening. If there was any doubt this was the new official line, ARN reposted the interview on its own podcasts.
This was the approach ARN should have taken all along. In the 15 years since digital radio came to Australia, public adoption has been slow, and certainly much slower than the UK. Having a buzzy show on DAB+ may finally kick start things.
In part, the slow takeup is because the networks have been half hearted about trying to drive DAB+ listening. Notoriously, Southern Cross Austereo killed its Triple M Classic Rock brand on DAB+ because it was eating its main channel sister’s audience.
The radio industry has been in denial about the failure of DAB. One example comes from industry body Commercial Radio + Audio. When it publishes data about listening via digital, it labels the data as DAB+ stations, despite the fact that the numbers combine both online streaming and DAB+ broadcasting. A more accurate title would be digital stations.
The industry also currently publishes much poorer data about listening to the digitally-led stations than it does those on AM and FM. Only cumulative numbers, not average listening, is available. That won’t help the narrative around O’Connell’s show when his average numbers will only include Sydney and Melbourne.
When digital radio launched in Australia in August 2009, it was with a big bang. The Radio United project saw all the networks bring their shows together for on-the-street live broadcasts across the five metro capitals.
The Christian O’Connell rollout, presumably accompanied by The Kyle & Jackie O Show doing the same thing for Kiis, creates a new opportunity for the radio industry to drive the audience towards DAB+ now that it is at least available in more cars.
A gift from Jonesy & Amanda
Meanwhile, Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones have had their week of mourning the loss of their Sydney breakfast show. As radio professionals, their job now is to put ego aside and get behind O’Connell’s launch in to Sydney by acting as though they are genuinely enthusiastic about their move to drive.
If they’d been fired, they would be entitled to feel disgruntled. But they’ve accepted breakfast money to do drive hours, and with that comes the obligation to give their successor every chance of success. Which is not what they’ve done so far.
In order to succeed when they move the Jonesy & Amanda show to its new time slot, they will need the rest of their station to do well, including O’Connell in Sydney breakfast.
The human factor of not wanting to give up their original show is understandable. They will have seen O’Connell gun for their slot for a couple of years and I’m sure that rankled given their long term success and loyalty to the network.
But they’ve taken the money.
By going rogue with their on air announcement of their switch (on the thin justification that a podcast was going to be talking about it) they panicked ARN into an early announcement of Christian O’Connell’s move into Sydney, and the bungled messaging about live and national.
ARN already has enough of a radio-gone-rogue problem with the Kyle & Jackie O Show. It doesn’t need a Jonesy & Amanda ego problem too.
SEG wins the day on the Unmade Index
The country’s smallest listed radio business Sports Entertainment Group topped the Unmade Index on Friday with the owner of SEN Radio rising by 7.3% to a market capitalisation of $80m. Radio rivals Southern Cross Austereo was also up, gaining 1.7% to land on a market cap of $140m. ARN Media narrowly remained the biggest audio company with a market cap of $144m.
Elsewhere on the index, the first day of Domain’s suspension from trading ahead of its sale to Costar at the end of the month meant less movement for majority owner Nine’s share price.
Fellow TV player Seven West Media lost 3.3%.
Agency holdco Enero had the worst day, losing 4.6%.
The Unmade Index closed the day almost flat on 587.7 points.
More from Mumbrella…
Time to leave you to your Saturday. We’ll be back with more soon.
If you’d like a little more, we had a great episode of MediaLand on ABC Radio National last night. Our guest was Chris Janz, co-founder of Capital Brief, and former boss of Fairfax and Nine’s publishing operation. He had plenty to say about the future of newspapers and the state of play with the government and platforms. I suspect it may make some headlines. Vivienne Kelly and I also discussed the Christian O’Connell move, the Logies results and counting protest crowds.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
