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Tuesday

Melissa Kite

Has Airbnb just declared war against its hosts?

The Airbnb help centre chatbot kept telling me that she understood how frustrating it must be for me to have all these problems created by Airbnb. But she offered no solution, save for congratulating me effusively on being a wonderful host. After a while I asked this person, allegedly a woman: ‘Are you real or is this AI?’ For the relentlessly upbeat drivel she was churning out bore no resemblance to the furious questions I was typing in. I could have told her I was about to throw myself out of the window because of the rise in Airbnb’s fees and the redesign of their app that stops me from

Dot Wordsworth

The creep of AI ‘slop’

‘The creep of “AI slop” in writing on the arts is everywhere,’ complained the Telegraph’s music writer Ivan Hewett the other week, and it’s up to us readers, he says, to stop it. For others, it means weirdly disjointed videos of anthropomorphic cats. But where did the forceful term AI slop come from? For prisoners, slopping out meant emptying chamber pots in the morning. For two centuries slop has been swill or food for pigs. At the same time it could be dirty household water. Long before that, it meant unappetising, semi-liquid food. Sloppy Joes were, from the 1940s, a kind of mushy hamburger (and also a loose-fitting sweater). I

Monday

Alex Diggins

Who wants to bring back the Neanderthals?

In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible. Among their inventions were GPUs

Wednesday

Lionel Shriver

We’ve already given up on novels

Late last year, I was notified that one or more of my novels might have been fed to an Anthropic large language model, because in a class-action suit the company had reached a copyright settlement with authors who’d never given an AI Goliath permission to gorge on their work. Sure enough, a website verified that 11 of my books had been used as silage for this insatiable digital leviathan. Each of the LLM’s tasty Shriver mouthfuls may merit compensation of about $3,000. But before I take out a loan against that $33,000 sure thing to buy myself a Chinese EV, I should read the fine print: ‘court-approved costs and fees’

Daisy Dunn

China wants robots to look after the elderly

An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can consume as much power as a city. It has been estimated that, not too long from now, we’ll require 92 cities’ worth of extra power just to meet the demands of artificial intelligence. Ergo, the heat is on – but so, it is said, is a new cold war. On Radio 4 last week, Misha Glenny was exploring how the rapid evolution of technology is shaping the rivalry between the US and China. It turns out that the race for pre-eminence – in AI, at least – is as close

Tuesday

Sebastian Faulks

The mystery of what makes us special remains unsolved

Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special. Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match. Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes

Tuesday

Gary Dexter

Your AI Granny will speak to you now

There’s a trend on YouTube at the moment for videos in which older people give advice. They speak directly to camera, frankly and without pretension. One can almost sense the care home staff hovering in the background, coaxing their barely extant charges into making one last testament of their time on Earth. The videos have titles such as ‘Things I’d tell my 30-year-old self’, ‘Harsh realities of being an 85-year-old woman’, ‘A girl and a woman talk about life’, ‘Lessons learned’ and ‘How to deal with loneliness.’   The commenters below the videos respond, largely, with gratitude and a surprising lack of trollery. ‘I’m terrified of dying,’ one commenter writes. ‘I fear many things, but nothing scares me

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: AI won’t save the army

Brute force Sir: General Sir Nick Carter is correct to point out the fragility of the UK’s armed forces today (‘Empty shell’, 7 February). He is also right to highlight the level of expenditure which will be necessary to overcome 25 years of structural under-investment in defence if the UK and its allies are to deter or win any future war. However, the suggestion that the British armed forces might be saved – relatively cheaply – by the institution of AI-automated kill chains alone is questionable. Indeed, it may be just another mirage of the type which has contributed to the current predicament. Autonomous weapons systems have existed for many years.

Sunday

Sean Thomas

Moltbook: has AI created its own religion?

20 min listen

What did you most recently use Artificial Intelligence for? For most people, the answer would be as a glorified search function, using services like Chat GPT to ask questions, draft text and even produce images – like the Chat GPT generated thumbnail image for this episode. The capability of AI far exceeds this most though. Sean Thomas joins Damian Thompson for this episode of Holy Smoke to talk about ‘Moltbook’, a social network built exclusively for AI agents – and which has now created its own AI ‘religion’. What does this mean for humankind? Is AI just replicating a belief impulse, to the extent that one exists within humans? And

Moltbook: has AI created its own religion?

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Is Keir Starmer prepared for the AI-pocalypse?

Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former adviser. ‘They’ve started well but they are now in danger of blowing it.’ When Labour came to power they consigned much of the past 14 years of Tory rule to the dustbin. But Starmer poured resources into Rishi Sunak’s AI Security Institute and published an AI Opportunities action plan in January last year, declaring (very un-Starmerishly) that he wanted to ‘mainline AI into the veins’ of the economy. Last week an audit found that 75 per cent of the proposals had already been

Ross Clark

The glaring flaw in Keir Starmer’s AI plan

Like Harold Wilson and his ill-defined ‘white heat of technology’, Keir Starmer has latched on to artificial intelligence as the saviour which is finally going to jolt Britain’s sluggish economy into growth. He once even suggested it would help fill potholes. A year ago he launched his AI Opportunities Action Plan, which is supposed to give the industry a huge boost through the designation of ‘AI Growth Zones’. But there is a big hole in Starmer’s plans. How are we going to power an industry that has become as voracious in its energy needs as the steel, shipbuilding and other heavy industries which it might one day replace? The high

The Spectator

How to fight the AI revolution

Ask ChatGPT to write a Spectator leader about the risks of AI and it begins like this: ‘There are two kinds of people talking about artificial intelligence today. One group is exhilarated, convinced that AI will usher in a new era of abundance, productivity and human flourishing. The other is distinctly alarmed, warning of mass unemployment, runaway systems and even existential catastrophe. They disagree on almost everything – except one crucial point. This is going to be a big change. And Britain, like most countries, is not nearly ready for it.’ As the bot identifies, the consensus among experts is that AI’s impact will be seismic, whether for good or

Nick Carter

Our armed forces are hollow – and our enemies know it

When you’re the chief of the defence staff, the head of the British armed forces, it’s never a good sign if your phone rings on a Sunday evening and it’s the permanent secretary. On this particular Sunday, in March 2021, the reason for the call was the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, which was due to be published the following week. Although we had been closely involved in the work, the permanent secretary had been told that the chancellor had approved a settlement that would lead to punishing cuts. Something had to be done. I fully expected to get sacked or resign in protest when I

Tuesday

Dennis Duncan

The scourge of plagiarism reaches crisis point

‘Talent borrows, genius steals.’ Do you like it? I just came up with it. No, honestly. Any resemblance to the work of anyone else is purely coincidental. The idea that taking someone else’s words and passing them off as one’s own constitutes a form of theft goes back to antiquity. Aeschines, one of Socrates’s disciples, was said to have read out dialogues appropriated from his master, to which one philosophically informed heckler blurted out: ‘Oh! you thief; where did you get that?’ But, as I learned from Roger Kreuz’s Strikingly Similar, it was the Roman poet Martial who gave us our modern word for this crime. Plagiarius means kidnapper. So

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why has Peter Thiel dumped his AI stocks?

How, I wonder, did a shortlist of candidates to succeed Sir Mark Tucker as chairman of HSBC come into the public domain? The three names ‘exclusively’ revealed by Sky News, if they really are the final contenders, ought to be a secret kept between a board committee led by senior independent director Ann Godbehere and the headhunters on the job, named as MWM Consulting. Two of the three – Kevin Sneader from Goldman Sachs and Naguib Kheraj, formerly of Barclays and Standard Chartered – might feature in a round-up of usual suspects. But the third is the former chancellor George Osborne, who has no public-­company chairmanship experience and is, to

Mary Wakefield

Say hello to your AI granny

Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing advert I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app. 2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. ‘Loved ones we’ve lost can

Anthony Seldon

I regret my intolerance over Brexit

Cannabis smoke lingering along the sidewalks of Washington D.C. was the most palpable fruit of liberty since my last visit to the US capital. I’m in town to give a talk at Britain’s dazzling Lutyens Residence about the evergreen ‘special relationship’ ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary next July. Acting ambassador James Roscoe has stepped up with aplomb to fill Peter Mandelson’s big shoes, aided by his renaissance wife, the musician, author and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill. America’s anniversary will fall on the watch of its 47th President. The Republic’s first four incumbents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, inspired by some of the greatest minds of their

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Are we in an age of necromancy?

19 min listen

Katherine Dee is the new technology correspondent for The Spectator World. She joins Freddy to discuss the phenomenon of necromancy, the practice of communicating with the dead, and how AI is fuelling it. How is technology blurring the lines between the living and the dead?

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

The disturbing allure of sex robots

By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have granted those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse by enabling victims to sue both the producers and the distributors of porn. The inspiration for this was Linda Lovelace, the star of

Friday

Nick Boles

Nick Boles, James Ball, Andrew Rosenheim, Arabella Byrne & Rory Sutherland

27 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Nick Boles says that Ukraine must stand as a fortress of European freedom; James Ball reviews If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudowsky and Nate Sores; Andrew Rosenheim examines the treasure trove of John Le Carre’s papers at the Bodleian; Arabella Byrne provides her notes on skip-diving; and, in the battle of the sexes, Rory Sutherland says the thing to fear is not feminisation, but emasculation. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.