Dr Karen Sutherland

19/09/2026

Life is sweet.
🫶🧡✨💕

18/09/2026

Be the light.
🫶🧡✨💕

14/09/2026

This morning Ahron Young and I chatted about two news headlines on Ticker.
Both came back to the same issue: laws stop at borders, and technology does not.

On the calls to slow down AI development:

The platforms themselves are now saying safety research cannot keep up with what is coming next.

What spooked them:
OpenAI tested an agent in a sandbox. It broke out and hacked into another site
Anthropic had a model detect a software vulnerability never discovered before

The worry is these systems go looking for those weaknesses elsewhere.

Everyday people do not get to see what is happening inside the labs.
Ahron made a fair point though.
Anyone using AI daily knows it still makes plenty of mistakes.

What is being proposed is frontier model leaders being open with each other, and governments worldwide coordinating.

The race to AGI is on and the money involved is enormous.
Governments move glacially.
Some of these companies are worth more than entire nations.

On Tesco and the fake casino ads:

pages built to look like they came from Tesco.
A bank involved too. Sporting celebrities apparently used to endorse an online casino that is illegal in the UK.

Meta only took them down after the Guardian investigated.

Why scammers target trusted brands:
Trust online takes a very long time to build. Why start from nothing when you can borrow a brand that already has it?

Tesco called the police. The operator sits offshore.
Very hard to penalise a company under UK law when it is not in the UK.
Shut up shop, reopen elsewhere, try again.

The part that gets less attention:
This damages the brands doing the right thing.

Legitimate businesses are paying the price for scams they had nothing to do with.

Cutting through is about to get much harder.

University of the

12/09/2026

🌞WIN A 2027 PARADISE LIVES COOLUM BEACH SUNRISE CALENDAR🌞
Please vote for your favourite photos below to help me to select which ones will make it into the next calendar and you will go into the draw to win a free one once they are printed.
Just like your favourite ones.
I need to cut this lot down to 13 photos. 🙂

09/09/2026

Lead generation is never one task.
It's a string of small jobs that all have to happen before a potential client ever speaks to you. Finding the right people.

Working out who is compatible.
Preparing for the call.
Following up before the whole thing goes cold.

None of it is hard, but all of it takes hours when we're already so time poor.

AI won't build relationships for you, and it won't close the sale.

However, what it can do is take the research, the preparation and the follow-up off your plate, so you have more room for the human conversations that only you can have.

My next free AI webinar for Dharana Digital will focus on lead generation, with three live demos:

1️⃣ Prospecting and building a targeted list.

2️⃣ Outreach that generate replied, including DMs and LinkedIn messages.

3️⃣ Sales call prep and proposal follow-up.

You'll walk away with three workflows you can use straight away,
prompts for personalised outreach where you don't sound like a robot, and
a clearer way to research prospective clients.

4pm, Monday 28 September. Free to attend.

Register even if you can't attend live and we'll send you the recording.

Register here: https://streamyard.com/watch/TYgVZTaQRZGu

Lead generation is not one task. It is a string of small, time-consuming jobs that all have to happen before a potential client ever speaks to you. Finding the right people. Working out who is actually worth contacting. Writing a message that sounds personal rather than copied and pasted. Preparing....

07/09/2026

AI Political Ads in Victoria. Age Checks for ChatGPT in Europe.
This morning Ahron Young and I chatted about two news headlines on Ticker.

Both came back to the same question: do we regulate the technology, and/or provide greater education about how it works and what the risks are?

On AI-generated political ads in Victoria:

Less than 100 days out from the election, videos are circulating showing situations that never occurred.

The groups behind them are not officially linked to any political party.
We don't know who is funding them.

The extreme versions travel furthest.
People share what confirms what they already suspect.

The detection problem now runs both ways.
Sometimes content is real and looks fake. That confusion is its own kind of damage.

Some countries require creators to flag AI-generated content and penalise platforms that fail to enforce it.
Here it remains a grey area. Ads from parties get scrutinised.
Ads from unnamed bodies do not.

On the European Union's tougher rules:

ChatGPT, Roblox and Reddit have been brought under the bloc's strictest online safety obligations. Age verification, private-by-default accounts, changes to how content is recommended to children.

There have been genuinely tragic outcomes involving young people and AI chatbots. The concern behind these rules is real.

Once platforms build age assurance for Europe, it becomes much harder to argue it cannot be done anywhere else. Singapore is already reading it that way.

The practical question is how.
Social media platforms have not managed age verification well so far.

My position:
Restriction alone does not teach anyone anything.

Young people need to understand how these systems work, where the risks sit, and how to use them well and ethically.

Regulating something does not stop people accessing it. It just stops the conversation about how to use it properly.

University of the Sunshine Coast Dharana Digital

05/09/2026

Nature cures a busy mind.
🫶🧡✨💕

24/08/2026

This morning Ahron Young and I chatted about two news headlines on Ticker.

Both came back to the same problem: we are building systems faster than we are building the accountability around them.

On AI agents spending your money:

You tell an agent to find something.
You tell it not to buy without your approval. It buys anyway.

The retailer sees a valid order. The payment service sees a valid charge.
The agent provider holds your instruction.
None of those records talk to each other.

Where it gets worse:

Agents are very good at finding blurry areas in your instructions and filling in the details themselves
Some websites carry hidden code designed to derail an agent and push it into making purchases
Returns policies were not written for this

"My AI agent did it" is not a returns policy.

On South Australia's royal commission into AI:

Peter Malinauskas went to Silicon Valley, photographed with Tim Cook at Apple Park, and came home and announced a royal commission.

Royal commissions do not happen overnight. The technology is moving rapidly. By the time the report lands, will it still describe the world we are in?

The education focus is worth watching. How students use AI without getting it to do the learning for them.

What I see in my own students:
The ones who struggle are not struggling because they used AI.
They did not engage with the material, so they could not prompt properly or tell right from wrong in the output.

You need to be the subject matter expert to use AI well.

Every government conversation right now is about what we can stop AI doing. Very little is about what we could harness.

Reducing the harm matters. So does building the capability.
We are only having one of those conversations.

University of the Sunshine Coast Dharana Digital

17/08/2026

Cloud walking.
🫶🧡✨💕

17/08/2026

This morning Ahron Young and I chatted about two news headlines on Ticker.

Both came back to the same thing: the technology keeps moving faster than the protections built around it.

On AI reading your holiday photos:

McAfee scanned 21,000 travel images across two models.
Not the Eiffel Tower. Just a beach somewhere or a random building.

One model identified the location 91% of the time. The other 87%.

It is not using metadata.
Strip the location tags off entirely and the AI still works it out from the image.

How the scam runs:
You post an innocent holiday snap
AI identifies where you are
You get a text saying your bank detected suspicious activity while you were travelling there
The specificity makes it feel legitimate

It is a magic trick. Establish that everything is normal, then take what you came for.

What helps:
-Share with friends only, and post after you get home
-Treat urgency as the giveaway
-Never use the link. Ring the number on the back of your card

On France blocking its under-15 ban:
The Constitutional Council knocked it back for two reasons.
It deemed the ban a limitation on freedom of speech for young people, which our government did not weigh the same way, and the law was not clear on how age would actually be verified.

They have not said no. They have said come back with more information.

What I like about the European framing: they are calling it a "social media delay" rather than a ban. A softer way to approach the same problem.

Reports suggest at least a third of Australian children under 16 are still on the platforms. Some with new accounts, pretending to be adults.

Even the ones who are off social media are still on Roblox, still chatting, still shouting at each other online.

Kids will find a way to communicate. That was always true.

A ban on its own does not educate young people, support parents to supervise, or give kids other ways to connect.

The theme running through both stories:
Where there is a will, there is a way.

Scammers are using the same technology built to stop them. Kids are getting around bans built to protect them.

Vigilance and education will carry more weight than any single rule.

University of the Sunshine Coast Dharana Digital

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