The week an AI chat machine changed the world

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

If you work in media, publishing, marketing or communications, or if you don’t but do care about ideas, academia, democracy and journalism, there was a new development last week worth paying attention to.

The ChatGPT (in its third version) launched only ten days ago and it already has more than one million users. In essence, this is an Artificial Intelligence programme by the firm OpenAI that can take a prompt or question and turn out text, short articles and essays. Without plagiarising, it will put together a perfectly acceptable non-human individual response that passes as having been written by a real person with a brain, a heart and a soul. Ask it to explain some aspect of science, or to assess Hitler and Stalin’s decision-making processes, or to describe the merits of Revolver, the Beatles masterwork, and it will turn out something readable and coherent. If your online history suggests you like jokes, it might even sprinkle in a computer-generated witticism or two.

Book editors and publishers tend to overuse the term “changed the world.” This or that development is sold in exaggerated fashion as having “changed the world”, to send the signal to a potential reader browsing in a bookshop or online that they had really better tune in. A confusing world will be explained, ordered, simplified, if only you read this narrative.

Occasionally publishers and authors are right when classifying a particular development as transformative for humanity. George Dyson’s book Turing’s Cathedral: the Origins of the Digital Universe is not the most straightforward read. His account of the birth of the computer does capture the enormity of what was achieved by the team of engineers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the mid-1940s, however.

Led by John von Neumann, a Hungarian refugee, a team of engineers set out to build a computer that realised Alan Turing’s theory of a “universal machine”. Through use of simple 1s and 0s, a binary choice, the machine could make calculations and at ever faster speed.

From this flowed everything we now enjoy, if that’s the right word, in terms of computers and smartphones. Some of it is positive. Thirty years ago if I wanted to read about American news or politics I had to go to the international news store in Edinburgh and pick up a copy, several days out of date usually, of a big US paper. Since then, the world has shrunk. Perhaps you’re reading this newsletter at breakfast in New York. If so, hello.

The conclusion of Turing’s Cathedral is ominous in terms of what computers will do eventually. Not only will the machines get faster. It is likely Artificial Intelligence will reach a point when the machines are so powerful they’ll have autonomy, if we let them. Philosophers and technologists argue about whether the machines will take over, bossing or even enslaving humans. Watch a digital addict go through TikTok or Twitter today and already that doesn’t sound outlandish. 

The potential takeover is getting closer, and the ChatGPT is a crossing point. This is not just a journalist complaining about what it will do to journalism. Though if you think the harm done by the first few phases of the internet didn’t matter, look at what it did to local and regional papers. The news ecosystem that monitored local government, the police and the courts has been shredded with disastrous results.

The ChatGPT and other such machines are a challenge for universities. Post-pandemic the move is towards online teaching and the delivery of essays and work online, because it’s cheaper for universities that are now businesses, and some students prefer it because having been digitised and then locked up during Covid they are wary of human contact.

It was difficult enough to spot fakery before the ChatGPT, with essay farms and digital native students skilled in using technology. Now, how could it ever be spotted? Worried academics report that early examples they’ve seen, testing the AI app, produce excellent essays that pass with decent marks.

There is an obvious opportunity, for good institutions, of course. They’ll have to return to prioritising written examinations and in-person oral tests, and banning online tests that can now be faked so quickly. If you are a young person who has abandoned writing by hand, think again. Start taking physical notes and get some practice in. It’ll be back to handwriting soon.

Having been through the first phase of the internet as a journalist, attending meetings in the 1990s when we were sceptical this thing would ever catch on, I’ve a pretty good sense or fear of where it’s headed. The machines will get better and better with practice.

Much news and information will be automated, generated by machines, checked (perhaps) by humans. Briefings, speeches, marketing plans, adverts, Search Engine Optimisation, novels even, or music and entertainment will be generated by asking the machine to produce what you want.

On the news and features front, it will be turned into audio automatically too, perhaps in the voice of your favourite presenter though they didn’t say it, or they may be dead. The machine will mimic them. Alexa, I’d like Alistair Cooke interviewing Duke Ellington please. Didn’t happen. Will that matter?

Look at what happened to politics when consumers shifted to get the supposedly “real” news and theories from their Facebook friends. In time, consumers will be able to get their own instant news feed of tailored stories generated by the machine, learning all the time what they like to hear and what they hate. Alexa, someone will say, tell me about Channel migrants today. 

In this way, we’re entering the next phase.

Faced with this nightmare, which will be widely popular and destructive in ways too numerous to imagine, some of us will cluster where real stuff is, books, magazines, gatherings., produced not by machines but by those who like mysterious humanity and think it is worth preserving.

It is more evidence for my view – but then I would say this, wouldn’t I? – that the fight to be human will become the defining struggle, sooner than we think.

Back Ukraine all the way

In the atrium of Portcullis House at Westminster there is a large exhibition stand on Russian war crimes in Ukraine. On the exterior are pictures of victims and the horror. Step inside, behind the gun metal grey facade, and it gets worse and even more explicit. This is the reality of what the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unleashed in terms of suffering.

At one end, a large video screen displays, rapid fire, image after image of the slaughter inflicted on the population. Over a metronomic ticking, smartphone conversations play out about atrocities, drawn from conversations between Russian soldiers and their deluded loved ones back home. 

The effect is hypnotising and deeply disturbing.

Emotion is said to be a poor guide to policy making. War and diplomacy involve moral compromises and choices. There is no perfect and just peace. Conflict isn’t going to end, ever, or not as long as humans are around. It has to be minimised where possible and managed. This is the painful reality of history.

And yet, emotion counts too. The Ukrainians are our allies and victims of a tyrannical bully. Russian aggression and war crimes cannot be allowed to stand. That should be the starting point for what comes next on policy making.

There is going to be a lot more of the chatter about the need for peace talks this winter. Several European leaders have started to talk about what happens after the war, as though it will end soon. There will be pressure on Ukraine to settle, or freeze, the conflict quickly.

It is important that these voices are not heeded. Ukraine should be backed all the way, to get as far as it can, to retake as much territory as possible, so that if or when there are talks, the country is negotiating from the strongest possible position.

I interviewed the historian Stephen Kotkin, Stalin biographer and a pro-Ukraine voice, on this earlier in the month. He pointed out that the “peace” when it comes eventually will be neither clean nor even clear.

Perhaps there will be a DMZ, a demilitarised zone, and some form of international monitoring for decades.

It will not be possible, or not for decades, for any of the states closest to Russia to assume benign intentions even in the event of a change of leadership in Moscow. A successor could be even worse. Even if he is not, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Baltic states, Finland and Sweden, and all their allies, will have to operate on the presumption that at any point we could wake up one morning to a palace coup in the Kremlin, and a resumption of the Ukraine conflict. That means stronger deterrence and vigilance are the priority, stretching out for many years.

Time to talk about Covid mistakes

The greatest diaries fizz with life, juxtaposing the serious with the mundane and quirky aspects of daily life. They’re written on the day. Alanbrooke’s classic account of the Second World War and working as CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) for Churchill are a case in point.

And so we turn to the Matt Hancock pandemic diaries.

When I read the extracts they struck me, immediately, as odd. They don’t read like diaries. They’re not diaries. And so it turned out. They were pieced together with the help of co-author Isabel Oakeshott, sifting through papers and matching it all up with news reports of the time. That’s why they read like an artificial construction after the event.

Whether Hancock realises it or not, and I suspect not, he has by accident produced one of the most interesting accounts of this period because it prompts so many questions about what might have been done differently during the Covid crisis.

Isabel Oakeshott wrote a piece for The Spectator addressing this. She sympathises with Hancock, as one of many people in government trying in tough circumstances to make decisions without the benefit of hindsight.

And yet, she is troubled by what she found. She lists a number of areas – on masks, vaccines, cancer care, and the treatment of dissent – where draconian British policy failed or created side effects worse than the pandemic itself.

Many people won’t want to hear it. It is natural to want to forget pandemics. The H1N1 flu pandemic killed around 50 million worldwide after the First World War, and was almost entirely absent from literature and popular culture a few years later. No-one wanted to know. Natural disaster. Move on.

Worryingly, this time many Britons seem to have liked being controlled by QR codes and testing regimes, and locked in their houses if it was of sufficient size and comfort. Lockdown, as someone said, where middle class people hid in their homes and were delivered food and goodies by working class delivery drivers.

I’m broadly a Covid centrist, vaccinated and realistic having had the damned bug three times. It was a pandemic and a lot was unknown at the time, and still is. But British policy was so deranged and over the top that citizens were arrested for walking in the park for more than an hour a day. The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates.

Now, put all that together with the rise of the AI machines I mentioned earlier in this newsletter and consider the potential for herding the population next time there is an emergency. Before then, shouldn’t we have a calm national conversation about the mistakes made and learn lessons?

Have a good week.