Nicholas Jose is a novelist and essayist whose thirteen books include the novels Paper Nautilus, Avenue of Eternal Peace (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award), The Custodians (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize), and Original Face. His latest novel is The Idealist (Giramondo, 2023). He is Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

It was a busy day in February. I was in my office at Monash University, squeezing in some emails with one hand and a quick bite of lunch with the other. Yeah, a typical day for an academic. That’s when I came across an email sent to me by a PhD student from another Australian university who wanted to know about a research paper I had written. They sent me the title of the paper, the abstract, and the author list.

Usually, this would prompt a straightforward reply. I would find the paper and share the PDF with them. This time, I paused. Sandwich mid-air and squinting at the screen, I tried to make sense of the details on my laptop. Sure, it’s not uncommon for academics to become confused about which of our papers appeared in which journal or conference, or when it was published. On this occasion, I almost began to question my sanity. When had I written the paper? More to the point, had I written it? After a few minutes of analysis, I concluded that it was a paper I definitely might have written. In hindsight, it was a paper I should have written. But I had not written it. ChatGPT had made up the title, the author list of people I had previously co-authored with, and a rather well-written abstract, and it had recommended this non-existent research paper to the PhD student.

This was my first brush with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is an intelligent chatbot that answers queries, explains things, and generates creative text. It was developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT3.5 architecture, where GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. In essence, it is an example of what’s called a ‘large language model’ that is trained on vast amounts of data to find patterns as to how words and phrases are related, and that uses this information to make predictions about what words should come next as it responds to user queries or prompts.

Nick Drake’s ‘Fruit Tree’, one of his best-known songs, addresses the idea that even if an artist is ignored in their lifetime, their legacy can be secured, and their work imortalised, with an early death. The song, as we learn from Richard Morton Jack’s exhaustive biography of the English singer-songwriter, was partly inspired by the precocious English boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, in 1770.

Drake did not have himself in mind when writing the song (it was among his earliest compositions), yet its foreshadowing of his own life, death, and impact have given heightened resonance to the track since his death at the age of twenty-six in 1974. Drake died in relative obscurity after creating three exquisite albums of baroque folk-pop, amid the colourful milieu that was the English folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A mainstream re-appraisal of his music gathered momentum in the 1990s; interest in him intensified with the arrival of the internet; and now it is fair to describe him as a major name in music.

A biography as thorough, sensitive, and sober as Nick Drake: The life is therefore overdue. Other notable books to tell Drake’s story include those by Patrick Humphries and Trevor Dann, but these were limited in various ways. For one, they did not have the approval of Drake’s sister, the actor Gabrielle Drake. She allowed Morton Jack free rein here, giving him access to family records, diaries, photos, letters, and other documents, most of which have not been published before. Her brother’s childhood diary entries, and letters to Drake from his father, are particularly illuminating (and moving) among this trove. The result is that this is undoubtedly the definitive chronicle of Drake’s life, and likely to be the final word on an artist who has been the subject of fervent speculation and intrigue.

Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future recounts findings from a six-year ‘mission’ to ‘identify the villains’ in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Uncovering the history and future of AI through a feminist lens, Tracey Spicer puts the conservatism at the heart of these oft-touted ‘revolutionary technologies’ on full display. Spicer contextualises AI’s current omnipresence in a world ruled by money, the military, and men. Interlacing an impressive range of vignettes, Man-Made introduces the reader to everything from AI’s origins in women’s weaving, to racist soap dispensers, to Sexbots, to gaming, to driverless cars, to childcare robots, to the end of humanity.

We begin the journey by unpicking the myth of the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ of AI. The name given to the group of men who attended a conference at Dartmouth in 1956, where the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined. Spicer rebukes the conference’s lack of diversity – gendered, intersectional, interdisciplinary – and its overblown status as the beginning of AI as we know it. Although contributions were made, these ‘fathers’ were no more the first to discover AI than Captain Cook was the first to discover Australia. The privileged position occupied by this event and these men reflects a common theme in technology and science narratives where innovations are portrayed as the result of an individual man’s genius.