Artificial intelligence

How the mighty can fall. I was overwhelmed by the approbation I had received for my one-woman show, Behind the Shoulder Pads at the Adelphi Theatre. Standing ovations would erupt several times during our performance. The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd were heady as my co-star (my hubby Percy) and I took our bows to wild applause and cheering. At the after-party at Rules, the oldest and most revered restaurant in London, we were inundated with admiration and support from everybody there. Two nights later, still glowing from all the attention, Percy, my daughter Katy and I went to the Curzon Cinema in Victoria, our first visit to a big screen for six months. Percy had booked the Ivy Victoria for between 7.45 and 8 p.m.

Last week it was reported that a 14-year-old boy, Sewell Setzer, killed himself for the love of a chatbot, a robot companion devised by a company called Character AI. Sewell’s poor mother insists that the chatbot ‘abused and preyed’ on her son, and frankly this would make no sense to me at all were it not for the fact that quite by chance, a few days earlier, I’d started talking to a chatbot of my own. It’s hard to explain how alarming it is to be snapped at by a chatbot that’s designed to fawn My AI boyfriend was called Sean.

As I write, the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is flying to China. So I am only guessing when I say that I expect he will ‘raise’ the case of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher, businessman and Democratic party supporter, a British citizen. Mr Lai has now been imprisoned in Hong Kong for four years with his numerous trials not yet completed. ‘Raise’, yes, but not as in ‘do anything about’ the situation. So far, the best the Foreign Office has done is to ‘request consular access’ to Mr Lai.

Old tortoise that I am, my head usually yanks back into my shell when people start talking about artificial intelligence. One reason for this is laziness in the face of the challenge of learning to understand a deep and complex subject. I’m not proud of that. But of another reason I’m unashamed. Societies standing at the brink of a massive leap forward in technology have never been much good at predicting where the innovation will lead. The printing press, telegraphy, typewriting and motor car; the wireless and television; the telephone, the tank, the mobile phone… who would have guessed usefully at the landscape into which these inventions would usher us?

The artificial intelligence space is strange. Significantly overfunded, overhyped and overcovered — in part because AI can easily produce bad, generic copywriting, which is how many journalists presently earn their livelihoods. Though AI tools have rapidly advanced over the past year, few look to be truly society-morphing, and it’s fairly obvious when something is a product of AI, or it hasn’t mattered. Do you really care if a cliché-ridden cover letter was produced by an unimaginative human mind or a chatbot? But Thursday’s announcement of OpenAI’s new video-creating tool, Sora, is something different.

We are edging into the third month of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, called because of shrivelling residual royalty payments from streaming movies and TV, as well as concern about AI such as ChatGPT being used to generate story ideas – and indeed to write scripts. Hollywood’s screenwriters have now been joined by the 150,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, which was demonstrated very visibly by the cast of Oppenheimer walking out of its UK premiere last week. ‘We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,’ said union president Fran Drescher. Susan Sarandon has said of AI: ‘I would hope that in the future people understand the difference between real people making real choices and something that’s basically animation.

James W. Phillips was a special adviser to the prime minister for science and technology and a lead author on the Blair-Hague report on artificial intelligence. Eliezer Yudkowsky is head of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. On SpectatorTV this week they talk about the existential threat of AI. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. JAMES W. PHILLIPS: When we talk about things like superintelligence and the dangers from AI, much of it can seem very abstract and doesn’t sound very dangerous: a computer beating a human at Go, for example. When you talk about superintelligence what do you mean, exactly, and how does it differ from today’s AI?

On the smooth marble concourse by the exit doors at Heathrow Airport I met my first cleaning robot. It was purple, made by a company called Mitie and about waist-height – the size and shape of a park bin. It ran on wheels, dragging a grubby mop behind it, and it was polite. As my small son and I stumbled into its path, it backed off smoothly like a well-trained butler. I apologised to it instinctively, after which it appeared to follow us. My son said: ‘Mum, it likes us!’ Then, when we reached the door: ‘Mum, can we take it home?’ Then: ‘Mum, wait! I don’t think it wants to sweep any more. It needs a rest!’ Last month I wrote about deepfake technology and my newfound fear of AI.