21 August 2026

Welcome

One-third of a random sample of all web content published since ChatGPT was released shows signs of being written by AI. Around half of US adults use chatbots, including 24% who say they use them daily. So that’s a thing.

I’m not sure I’m happy with this thing. How about you?

Anyway, Meta is in court again, Roblox has been slapped for being slack about kids’ safety again, the big online platforms are being asked to pay for news again, and Australians will be able to opt out of gambling advertising thanks to internet magic. What a week!

Sigh.

If you’re looking for something fun to watch this weekend, you might want to seek out reports from Beijing’s World Robot Conference. Humanoid robots are all the rage these days as you’ve probably noticed, especially in China. Some of them even seem to work.

Blocking online gambling ads thru tech magic

Rather than banning online gambling advertising entirely, the Australian government will be setting up a register so internet users can opt out of gambling ads, somehow

The register is to be operational within 12 months, and will be funded by a new tax on the gambling companies.

As the Guardian reports, “In the meantime, from 1 January, all online services must provide an opt-out function if they want to display gambling ads. But little is known about how the one-stop opt-out register will operate, with questions about data privacy and how exactly people will be able to use it”.

A single register for opting out would be useful for end users, sure, but adverts arrive on people’s devices via many different routes.

Websites and mobile apps don’t choose which ads they show. Rather, they rely on embedded software from advertising broking platforms, and that software decided on the fly which ads should be shown. That decision is based on both what the brokers know about the end users — identified by cookies planted on their device — and what the advertisers are willing to pay. Every platform will now need to interrogate the register to see whether gambling ads can be shown as part of the mix.

But what if the end users is running anti-tracking technology such as a cookie blockers?

And what about podcasts? Sports podcasts in particular might have gambling ads read by the presenters. Would there now need to be two different versions of the pod, one without the problem ads, with a correctly-chosen version sent to the two different types of users? Once more, this requires the podcast distribution platform to identify individual users.

Come on you nerds, just nerd better and solve the social problem!

Your writer can’t help but think this is another case of the government proposing a solution to a problem, and simply expecting the technology sector to nerd harder and make it happen — just as they did with the teen social media ban, and the much-ridiculed “internet clean feed” of what now seems like a bygone era.

“The government’s legislation leaves the details about how the register will work to the Australian Communications and Media Authority,” writes the Guardian.

The legislation itself consists of the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 and its friend the Interactive Gambling (Cost Recovery Levy) Bill 2026.

Meanwhile, ACMA continues to issue blocking notices to help prevent Australians from seeing overseas gambling websites which would be illegal under Australian law.

BONUS LINKS: Back in 2018 Crikey ran a series called Prying Eyes which covered a range of topics about personal surveillance online, including several pieces on the advertising industry. Your writer was the editor of that series. You can also see the articles I wrote personally in my own content archive.

WHY NOT SUPPORT THIS NEWSLETTER?: You’re more than welcome to forward these emails to your colleagues, friends, families, and secret intermittent companions. However The Weekly Cybers is currently unfunded. It’d be lovely if you threw a few dollars into the tip jar at stilgherrian.com/tip. Thank you to those of you who’ve already done so.

Also in the news this week

• Parliament passed all the legislation to “incentivise” the big online platforms to pay for news: the News Media Bargaining Charge Bill 2026, the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026, and three related bills. SBS News has a quick summary. TV networks are happy, obviously.

• Australia will be getting a new Cyber Reserve Force, which will recruit cybersecurity professionals to provide the defence force with a cyber surge capability.

• Roblox has been slapped with a court-enforceable undertaking by the eSafety Commissioner, being told once again to do more “to protect children from grooming, sexual exploitation and abuse”.

• It turns out that the report of last year’s age assurance tech trial, the thing that was meant to show that Australia’s teen social media ban would be technically feasible, was plagued with AI hallucinations. According to the Guardian the organisation which ran the trial, the UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), “initially denied the use of AI in the report, but later conceded that AI had been used to rewrite paragraphs more succinctly”.

• The federal government is paying to access at least six AI suites, including around 29,000 paid licenses for Microsoft’s Copilot.

• Queensland's City of Moreton Bay is going to trial the use of AI-controlled traffic lights, which researchers hope will learn to provide a smoother traffic flow.

• Coles and Woolworths are testing facial recognition technology, aiming to reduce retail crime and staff abuse.

NEW PODCAST: BRITISH POLITICS AND MORE! The weird goings-on in British politics were a focus of my latest podcast episode, The 9pm Clacton and On and On with David F Porteous, Scottish author and social researcher. We also discuss Barnaby Joyce’s claim that One Nation is “one of the gayest parties in Australia”, the early days of social media, maths, physics, shrinkflation, and more. Look for The 9pm Edict in your podcast app.

Elsewhere

• The Pew Research Center has been looking at how much of the internet is written with AI. “In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released,” they write, along with some pretty graphs.

• Meta is back in court over claims that its platforms breach children’s privacy rights, the new chapter in a lawsuit first filed by 29 US states back in 2023. As BBC News reports, “Not only are the states seeking billions of dollars from Meta, they are demanding it make changes to Instagram and Facebook, including ending ‘like’ counts and infinite scroll”. The BBC ran a live blog of day 1 in the trial, which was Wednesday, and a summary.

• Donald Trump has issued an executive order allowing private companies to be hackers in the national interest (New York Times gift link), bringing it more into line with China and Russia. It’s the right idea, reports Seriously Risky Business, although some news reports have used the term “cyber privateers”.

• France’s teen social media ban has been struck down as unconstitutional. The country’s Constitutional Council said the ban “constitutes an infringement that is neither appropriate, necessary, nor proportionate” to the freedom of expression and communication for under-15s.

• Anthropic has started watermarking its AI-generated output and AI users are a bit cranky about it, reports Pivot to AI. Some of their arguments against the labelling of AI-generated content are, to say the least, amusing.

• Also from Pivot, news that computer memory prices are up 500% or more in just the last year, creating all manner of supply chain problems. These in turn have led to a downturn in personal computer sales.

• The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has a new newsletter on China and AI titled AI Under Heaven.

• Brazil has launched a US$444 million AI supercomputer push, splitting projects between US and Chinese tech firms.

• From the Lowy Institute, “New Zealand had long been considered the weakest link in Five Eyes and the easiest for China to try to cow. But New Zealand has now called out China by name in its intelligence warnings so often that officials joke it has become tougher on Beijing than Australia is.”

• From the Australian Institute of Criminology, a new research paper, Examining the ecosystem of live streamed child sexual abuse.

Inquiries of note

• The federal government has created a Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, with wide-ranging terms of reference. Its reporting deadline is 30 November. The closing date for submissions has yet to be announced.

What’s next?

Parliament is now on a break until Monday 7 September, which is 17 days away, when it returns for two weeks of sittings.

DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? Let me know. If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.