What a pair of clowns (ALP and LNP)…
Also I really hate TikTok.
There are currently no rules at either the state or federal level to stop political parties and candidates from using AI-generated material in election campaigns.
This isn’t a US politics thing, it is happening everywhere. Politics has been extremely negative and hyper-focused on character assassinations since the rise of social media - generative AI is just the latest weapon being used in this new battleground. Even if there are party rules or laws introduced to prevent official campaigns and offices from doing this, it will still continue to spread via the public. We are now living in an age where anyone can do this stuff pretty quickly and easily and that will only accelerate as the technology improves.
EDIT: Some examples of generative AI being used in major elections this year:
No what…?
@Ilandar
I can’t see the daily discussion topic, but it was something about Aus developing trends of USA politics. They’re already here. We have two republican parties.Ah I see, maybe this is a formatting error as you’re commenting from Mastodon. From my perspective it looked like you were directly replying to my comment. That was confusing as you didn’t appear to be responding to anything I’d said.
We have two republican parties
LNP and the Greens?
I’m struggling to understand what’s going on here, even if I click up to view context. If we’re talking “two republican parties” with a lower case R, I’d think that would be Greens and (some of) Labor.
If we’re talking about analogies to American politics, surely that would be LNP, One Nation, and United Australia Party, but the latter has just 1 Senator and zero state representatives, so maybe we’re ignoring it to get to 2 Republican parties. Or maybe they meant Liberal and National as two parties?
Tagging @stepchook@mastodon.au, your interlocutor, for visibility.
Yeah I meant to include a “/s” because I’d probably associate Greens, Labor and around the “Malcolm Turbull” part of the Liberals with the Democrats, and the Nationals, One Nation, UAP and the rest of the Liberals with the Republicans
@Zagorath @unionagainstdhmo
Allow me to focus on the anti-protest law.
How did that arise from the workers?
Isn’t industrial action a fotrm of protest?I genuinely don’t have any clue what you’re trying to say here, sorry.
@unionagainstdhmo
I’m not accusing the Labor party of popular sovereignty.No, @Zagorath@aussie.zone did some analysis a while ago and found that Labor were overrepresented in parliament based on first preferences nationally, ignoring the electoral boundaries. The Greens, One Nation and various independents would have more representation in parliament if we didn’t use localities to determine the makeup of parliament
@unionagainstdhmo
I’m not about to vote liberal, but feel disappointed by some Labor decisions. The anti-protest law in particular seem to have bipartisan support despite democratic resistance. Protests over freedom of association were once the backbone of union membership and strength.That’s true.
The Greens proportionally deserve 18.4 seats, but have only 4.
Labor deserves 48.9 seats but has 68.
LNP deserves 53.6, but has 58.
One Nation deserves 7.4, has 0.
It’s actually a very easy calculation to do yourself. Literally just 150 × percentage 1st preference votes. Obviously it’s not perfect, because if you change the voting system you also change how parties campaign, which changes how the votes turn out. But it’s a good rough idea.
But uhh…I’m not really sure how this is relevant to this thread.
@unionagainstdhmo
I was being sarcastic. I meant republican in the American sense of being reactionary. The Labor party seems compromised by the mining lobby.Riiiiiight I thought you meant in terms of politics and my response about the Greens was being sarcastic. Though the Greens and LNP get dragged into culture wars alot easier than Labor
@unionagainstdhmo @Zagorath
That is very insightful. obviously if the greens had more power, they would also end up having to strike more deals to get their bills passed. I understand that some compromise is how party politics works. Very sad that senator Payman had to go.Still allowed to voice my dissent over issues that bother me. The anti-protest laws suck. In WA the fines are $15,000 for disrupting normal activity. ‘Republican’ is a confusing word. the anti-protest laws are downright Cromwellian
I’d argue we are:
- We have two heavily entrenched major parties, at least wholly or partially owned by corporate interests (ALP less so than LNP)
- Politicians going out of their way to create needless division and damage social cohesion, turning Australians against each other (see “antisemitism” and voice to parliament)
- Most people are politically disengaged voting along previous party lines or doing very little research due to hopelessness
- Political advertising and campaigning is becoming more and more disgusting with very little care given to facts, logic and science with an emphasis on “CoMMOn SeNSe”
It’s a little harder to go full fucked up US here owing partially to our mandatory preferential voting system (but don’t worry the QLD LNP are promising to get rid of that if elected). The system could be made much better though, we should ditch the idea of region based electorates and use some kind of proportional representation so that no matter where you live your voice will be heard.
You forgot the other common denominator:
Both US and Australia have Murdoch media
Yes and we’ve probably got it worse because we also have 7 and 9 which are Coalition propaganda as well. The ABC is somewhat neutral, and 10 seem to be Liberal-leaning. No left-wing/Labor biased media to balance the rest and people’s trust in the impartiality of “the news” will only lead us further down this route
I never used to care about politics (you can thank the NBN debacle for opening my eyes), but its so hard to watch anything on free to air TV without noticing the massive positive bias towards the Liberals now. Everything is worded to ensure you take away the message they are pushing, as opposed to learning the facts. Half the news stories just end up as advertorials for Liberal policy with no balance or critique. Its no wonder people who dont really give a shit end up so anti-Labor/Greens without even realising why.
Was kinda happier being oblivious tbh.
I sometimes watch friendlyjordies but I have to take a break because it makes me feel really hopeless about society
Power of TV is waning, younger generation live out social media, not TV. So things are going to turn worse.
Are we going down the same path as US politics?
It depends what you mean, that’s a vague and broad question. Societies are complex and there are obvious similarities and differences between our two systems, our two cultures and our two main parties.
For similarities, we both have ‘liberal democracies’, which positions our system as ultimately a popularity contest. So unfortunately, techniques used in other countries will be sold or copied over here. We saw this with different elections (US election, UK Brexit) all being involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If it works and they aren’t going to get caught, we’ll copy it.
Another similarity is the heavy integration of capital in politics. You know, ‘lobbying’, media corporation backing, and all that. The US are further down that track, but it’s just an inevitable consequence of capitalism - power tends towards groups with the most money. So politicians who please capitalists get exponentially more resources to dominate the mass media. This famous analysis of US mass media translates very well over to Australian mass media and politics.
As for differences, we overall seem to expect dignity and professionalism from politicians. For one example, we appear far less prone to electing celebrities. An exception that springs to mind is Peter Garrett, but even then they were famous for very political band, it’s a different ballpark to Reagan, Schwarzenegger or Trump. While they’re not the same, it is worth noting that Clive ‘Discount Trump’ Palmer didn’t go far, even with massive campaign spending on advertisements.
As a final mention, we don’t use a FPTP electoral system, so there isn’t quite the same dominant federal two-party system of the USA. There are the dominant parties/coalitions, but Greens or Teals have shown themselves as able to seriously threaten Labor and Liberal parties for seats. So we don’t get stuck between picking ‘the lesser evil’ like most of the US are pragmatically forced to. Some people in Australia praise compulsory voting, but I see preferential voting as far more important. Always improvements, but that alone puts our system at the forefront of ‘liberal democracy’ systems
There are currently no rules at either the state or federal level to stop political parties and candidates from using AI-generated material in election campaigns.
Why should there be? They already use video editing. The issue should be making misleading content, not which tool was used to make it. Mandate labeling it clearly to say it’s not real footage.
Also I really hate TikTok.
That’s how I feel about almost every social media platform. I even complain about Lemmy occasionally!
Election cycles are seasonal events and there is a traveling circus that supports them across the English speaking countries. There is also trans-national movement within political influence businesses like News Corp and other lobby groups.
Historically Australia has often adapted media from elsewhere whether it be advertising or television formats and much of the country was so isolated pre-Internet that we never noticed that football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars was a ripoff of hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet.
I expect over negative/false/deceptive campaigning would be regulated as we have a comparatively robust and fair electoral system. AI is built into popular image editing tools and political staffers aren’t necessarily great graphic artists so I expect we will see more low effort AI images in political advertising and everywhere else as society continues to embrace mediocrity and deskilling.
It does seem like whatever integrity there was in politics is quickly vanishing. I’m relieved we don’t have quite the same attitude towards religion compared to the US at least. I think Australia is a long way off being a theocracy, whereas the US could be one as soon as next year.