The latest viral sensation making rounds on social media features what appears to be an emotional support kangaroo at an airport check-in counter. It’s adorable, it’s heart-warming, and it’s completely fake - generated entirely by artificial intelligence.

Let’s be honest here - scrolling through my feed last night, even I paused for a moment when I first saw it. The kangaroo looked surprisingly convincing, holding what appeared to be a boarding pass, and the setting seemed plausible enough. But then I turned the sound on, and that’s when everything fell apart. The “conversation” was pure gibberish - not English, not any recognizable language, just AI-generated nonsense that somehow managed to sound vaguely like several languages at once.

The digital landscape keeps throwing curveballs at us, and the latest one’s particularly fascinating. Recently, there’s been quite a stir about Google’s AI pulling “citations” directly from Reddit comments. The example making rounds involves a Smashing Pumpkins performance at Lollapalooza, where Google’s AI confidently declared it was “well-received” based on a single Reddit comment using the phrase “one-two punch” - despite historical accounts suggesting they were actually booed off stage after three songs.

The tech industry’s latest campaign to make computer science and AI mandatory subjects in US schools has sparked quite a debate online. While sitting here in my home office, watching the morning traffic crawl along Hoddle Street, I’ve been pondering this push and its implications for our own education system.

Reading through various online discussions about this initiative, I’m struck by a recurring theme: we’re putting the cart before the horse. Sure, understanding AI and computer science is crucial for the future, but what about the fundamentals? Many educators are reporting that students are struggling with basic literacy and numeracy skills, let alone typing proficiency.

The recent discussions about Gen Z’s perception of AI consciousness have left me both fascinated and deeply concerned. Working in tech, I’ve watched the rapid evolution of AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini, but the notion that a significant portion of young users believe these systems are conscious is troubling.

Let’s be crystal clear - current AI systems, regardless of how sophisticated they appear, are not conscious beings. They’re incredibly complex pattern-matching machines, trained on vast amounts of human-generated content. The fact that they can generate human-like responses doesn’t make them sentient any more than a calculator becomes conscious by solving equations.

The internet never forgets, and it certainly has a way of catching out politicians who haven’t quite mastered the art of social media. Today’s serving of political comedy comes from the Young Nationals, who seem to have taken a page from the “How Not to Use Social Media” handbook by accidentally praising themselves from their own account.

This gaffe immediately reminded me of similar incidents we’ve seen before, including that memorable moment when another politician congratulated himself on Facebook. It’s like watching someone trip over their own shoelaces – embarrassing, but you can’t look away.

The news about California’s proposed bill requiring AI companies to remind kids that chatbots aren’t people caught my attention during my morning scroll through tech news. While it might seem obvious to many of us working in tech, the reality of human-AI interaction is becoming increasingly complex.

Working in DevOps, I interact with AI tools daily. They’re incredibly useful for code reviews, documentation, and automating repetitive tasks. But there’s a clear line between using these tools and viewing them as sentient beings. At least, that line is clear to me - but apparently not to everyone.

The recent discussions about AI’s role in education have left me pondering the future of learning. While scrolling through my Twitter feed at my local Carlton café this morning, I came across several heated debates about AI integration in schools, and it struck me how this technology is rapidly reshaping our educational landscape.

The introduction of AI tools in classrooms isn’t just about fancy tech gadgets or automated marking systems. It’s fundamentally changing how our kids learn and interact with information. Some schools in my area are already experimenting with AI-assisted learning programs, and the reactions from parents and teachers have been mixed, to say the least.