Welcome to a Tuesday update from Unmade
Today, we reveal the lineup for The Great DebAIt, where the inventor of The Newspaper Extinction Timeline will take to the stage to argue that AI is not media’s extinction level event.
And below the paywall, in our members-only content, we make the case that the real question on the digital platforms isn’t whether they pay for news, it’s why they aren’t being made to pay more local tax. Plus, the Unmade Index bounces back.
Unmade’s paying members support our analytical journalism. In return you get access to our full archive which goes behind the paywall after two months.
You also get discounts on tickets to our events, including next month’s AI conference humAIn, our retail media conference, REmade and a free ticket to our annual Compass series.
AI of the Tiger: it's the thrill of the fight
Cat McGinn, curator of HumAIn, writes:
We can today unveil our lineup going head to head for The Great DebAIt, our showcase of provocative, big-picture thinking to end our AI conference HumAIn.
The proposition for this year’s Great DebAIt is “AI is the news media’s extinction-level event.”
Each speaker has four minutes to make their case, with the audience casting a vote before and after the presentations. Can our debAIters change hearts and minds?
The affirmative team includes Karen Powell, CEO of Omnipresence; John Cucka, head of Kantar Analytics Australia, and Jessie Hughes, senior creative technologist at Leonardo.ai.
Powell advises B2B leaders on AI technology integration with a focus on revenue. A Global AI Council member, her background includes leadership roles at Bastion and McCorkell & Associates.
Cucka specializes in quantitative models for marketing decision-making. He brings over 30 years of experience in data science, AI, and statistics.
And along with her work at AI image generation startup Leonardo.ai, Hughes is an internationally recognised new media artist. Her work, exploring emerging technologies, has been showcased at Sundance, SXSW, and the Tate Modern.
And opposing the motion, arguing that AI is not media’s extinction-level event are futurist Ross Dawson, Tom Robinson, CEO of Edelman Australia, and Scott Purcell, co-founder, Man of Many.
Dawson may be best known for his Newspaper Extinction Timeline which charted the decline of traditional print newspapers. Written in 2010, Dawson predicted that newspapers in their current form would become insignificant in Australia by 2022. Dawson runs the AI + Humans Explorer community.
Robinson oversees Edelman’s Trust Barometer, research into public trust and sentiment towards businesses and institutions published annually. This year’s report, entitled Innovation in Peril, found that 53% of Australians reject AI, and believe innovation is being mismanaged.
Purcell’s publication Man of Many claims to have a nuanced approach to AI, leveraging its capabilities to augment the editorial processes while rejecting fully AI-generated content.
HumAIn takes place in Sydney on May 28. Tickets, and details of the full conference lineup are available via this link.
Last year’s Great DebAIt:
Making digital platforms pay a fair share of local tax is the real issue
Tim Burrowes writes:
It’s all coming to a head.
On multiple fronts, Australia’s lawmakers are being tested on their ability to set their own rules.
As we discussed in yesterday’s Start the Week podcast, in matters of taxation, content and rule of law, an overdue showdown is here.
The most urgent question is taxation. Advertising revenue being spent in Australia is leaking offshore, with most of it untaxed on the way out. Marketers giving business to Meta and Alphabet are involuntarily supporting (legal) tax minimisation on an industrial scale.
Over the last week, the Australian Financial Review has been examining the annual financial disclosures of the platforms. What has become clear is that the new laws designed to prevent taxable revenue from being sent offshore have failed.
Alphabet, with revenue in Australia on the way to $10bn - and the lion’s share of that pure profit - paid tax of just $132m in the 2023 financial year.
Meta, with topline revenue revenue of $1.34bn, declared local profits of just $34.7m, which is the amount it would then have paid tax on.
All those zeros and commas can get confusing. But for context, its roughly the equivalent of being on a $100,000 salary and paying $1,000 in tax.