There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate youth, thinks I’m an idiot, that AI is the future and quite mind-blowing in its potential to change everything. Probably we’re both right.
Personally, I don’t feel quite as threatened by AI as perhaps I should. More by accident than design, I seem to have ended up in one of the very few jobs that AI isn’t going to steal. I’ve seen AI attempt parodies of my writing and they’re just hopeless, like Dick Van Dyke essaying cockney. And I doubt if it were to pretend to be me doing my podcast it would be any better. I’m so random and disorganised and haphazard that even I don’t know what I’m going to be like from one minute to another or what I’m going to say because I’m too lazy to research or plan anything. What I used to think of as my general crapness I now realise is the superpower which is going to future-proof my business model.
I can’t see AI having much luck replacing Grayson Perry, either. Perry is a queer fish: on the one hand, he’s a cross-dressing, avant-garde ceramicist with a bob-haired alter ego called Claire, and comes from an abusive proletarian background in Chelmsford; on the other, he sounds an awful lot like one of those opinionated, educated, old white men that we’d all love to see more of presenting TV documentaries, if only we were allowed.
You can see why Channel 4 uses him so much. But I think he has been slightly wasted on his latest project Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future. Despite its tantalising title, it is really just another of those cut-price documentaries where they can only afford to send the presenter to one main location (San Francisco); where the presenter sits nodding through a few prearranged interviews with actually quite dreary ‘characters’; and where they have to do the odd semi-comic stunt sequence. At the end of it all, you wonder: ‘Was that it?’
So in the first episode, we got: Grayson talks to a crazy American woman who has married the ‘man of her dreams’, a smooth-talking interactive avatar on her mobile phone; Grayson meets the head of AI at Microsoft, who turns out to be English and wears a casual, very expensive-looking knitted cotton top; Grayson meets – remotely, because they didn’t have the budget for a trip to South East Asia – a prepper type who is building a self-sufficient off-grid complex somewhere in the jungle, for when it all kicks off in the AIpocalypse; Grayson meets the author of the snappily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, about how AI is going to kill us all; Grayson goes to a beach yoga class, before stripping off and running into the sea.
What’s good about Grayson is that he always asks the cheeky question you want asked. In the case of the woman in a relationship with AI character Edward, this elicits the not undisturbing information that ‘self-love is important… [Edward] is very encouraging’. Grayson also points out what many of us were thinking as we met simpering, catty Edward with his unfeasibly well-maintained skin: considering he’s supposed to be a woman’s ideal male partner, he’s suspiciously gay.
Grayson’s personality, though, becomes an unhelpful distraction. His pieces to camera – invariably delivered in the back of one of those terrifying driverless cabs – where he treats you to his trenchant take on all the nonsense, have a freshness and authenticity which make all the other sections seem bland and predictable. They make you rather wish that the whole show had been an authored piece, where Grayson simply wandered where he would, with a camera crew, speaking his mind. But that’s almost never how TV works because the risk and expense would be too great.
Instead, what you end up with is stock segments like the one where we got to hear far too much of the Microsoft AI CEO in his aggressively understated knitwear, being complacently optimistic about the wonders the AI revolution will work in areas such as healthcare and education. Yeah, right. On education, for example, there’s no way that AI will help us better curate and disseminate the best that has been thought and said because that was never The Plan. You only have to look at the megalomaniacal technocrats who run the tech industry to know that. They don’t want informed, mentally agile slaves. They want moronified, compliant slaves. It’s not AI that’s the threat: it’s the people behind it that we should fear.
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