Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here at the Private Eye office with Adam MacQueen, Jane McKenzie and Ian Hislop. We're here to discuss everything, not everything. Three things that have happened in the news since the last issue of the magazine was published. and we have a little bit of parish business just before we start. Finally we're going electric.
we're doing a live show at the Cambridge Literature Festival, and it's gonna be on the 26th of April. sorry to let you all know about this now because it's sold out in the room, but you can buy a streaming ticket if you like listening to this podcast. But you think it needs to be more visual. I need the, I need their faces. now's a perfect opportunity to do it if you as a way to lose listeners for they see what we actually look like. Disappointment. You're absolutely right.
So if you want to, if you want to buy a streaming ticket to see the thing happening, then you can go to private-eye.co.uk/podlive and you'll be able to get one there. It'll redirect you to the Cambridge literature festival website and the other thing we need to know before we start the episode, for that episode, for the live, what should we call it? This live, it feels like it needs a big title.
it's an incredible development in technology. We, move from doing this thing that's recorded on the wireless somehow and put out to doing it in a room a bit like theatre. So advance is again, but it's recorded on a wax cylinder sent
out to all of our subscribers if you'd like to ask us a question that we will read out and then answer in that room as part of that show, then we would love that. And you can email them to [email protected] uk. Parish business ends. let's, go straight to topic number one this week. As we've all ascertained, we're very, technically proficient ai. Adam, various newspapers have been making various announcements about how the future's bright. The future's
AI. Yes, they have indeed. Yeah. And some of them not making announcements when they should have been possibly as well. So we've written in the last couple of issues of street shame about The Guardian who have done a big deal with, open ai, which is probably the most famous of the AI firms as the one that behind Chat GPT. and they have not only handed over in return for some cash, access to their archive of stuff, which actually is what a lot of newspapers are doing.
they're not alone in doing this, making their online archives available for price to train AI models on. So other people who are doing similar things, include the Associated Press, Reuters, DMG Media, who are behind the Daily Mail titles. And the, I, the ft have done it. NewsCorp, we've done a deal with it with an AI provider as well. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing 'cause this is about training artificial intelligence. Models. So actually training them on reasonably reliable stuff.
you won't necessarily say that, all those newspaper titles I've just quoted, but it's better than just sending them out willy-nilly to, to steal stuff and crawl all over the internet and take stuff from whatever sites the AI models might fancy without any sort of judgment on it. So this is quite a good deal if I want to write an article in the style of
Owen Jones. And I always do.
This will make it easier for me to do that. thankfully you have access to, an AI model of some of the nation's best ISTs who are quite good at doing this sort of thing. So you probably don't need a bot to do that. But, but yeah, that is one part of the deal. Now, the other part of the deal, which, guardian staff did not find out about until a press release went out announcing it was, also with, OpenAI, the Guardian will be developing new products, features and tools.
Now that's caused quite a lot more consternation.
That's not quite the, holier than thou version of we train them on a proper, reliable model. Is it? No, that
sounds a lot more like we get them to do things that, that, that could replace journalists with, which I think has caused quite a lot of, understandable worry and paranoia.
we've talked before on this podcast about how the NUJ, the National Union of Journalists are extremely powerful at The Guardian, and they're already involved in negotiations over the use of or possible use of ai and trying to, sort out a policy with Guardian management, which essentially from the journalist point, if we would be, don't bring in ai. We don't want it.
No. there was consternation also, you'll remember the Guardian staff went on strike back in December a couple of times over the, sale of the observer to tor us. and at that point there was a lot of concern that, the kind of skeleton management staff who were left to put out the paper for a couple of days were using AI models to come up with headlines.
there's a lot of disgruntlement at the Guardian generally, but particularly over this kind of thing now since, the last issue of the eye came out, the Independent, remember them. Online only, newspaper. Yep. Yep. Owned by Yev friend of the podcast. it's announced that it will be launching something called Bulletin, which will be like the independent but shorter.
AI summaries of stories from the independent for time poor people, who are just too poor in time to read an entire story and need to have a robot do it first for them. Instead. Now they have assured their journalists and readers that, everything that's put out in bulletin will be reviewed and checked by human beings.
but they've also said that it's gonna go out with the original bylines on it, which, if I was an independent journalist, I think I'd be campaigns, have my byline taken off something that had been rewritten by a robot and put out,
and it has to be rewritten by a robot and then checked by a human being, how about a human being writing it?
Yeah, you could call 'em something like Subeditors, those archaic job titles of people we used to have on, on Fleet Street back in the old days.
What. Justification does any organization put forward, and I need to know this for when I sack the three of you. what justification is there apart from just getting rid of journalists?
a lot of it is to do with the fact that it's just the big new thing and it's very exciting. you hear Chris Stama talking about ai. he obviously thinks it's the future. Rachel Reeves has been talking about increasing efficiency in the, public sector and in the civil service by using AI for all sorts of things. he, does, you run into an immediate problem, which is the independent have already identified.
you also do have to have some humans looking over this stuff to make sure it's not introducing mistakes, which is the experience of. The use of AI in, in journalism already. one of the companies that's been using it for a while is, reach PLC, who are that publishing, BMO, who published the Daily Express Day Star, the Daily Mirror, and, over a hundred local papers as well. and they have tool called, and this is a nice historic reference. It's called Guten After Gutenberg.
You remember the inventor of the printing press who made the, the mass media possible back in, where was it? Very nice. 15th century. 16th century. I had a lot
of scribes, redundant
all of those monks suddenly not having to illuminate manuscripts. Yeah, they were probably up in arms as well. but they've been using it a lot. and, that's something that essentially. Rips, pieces of copy that have been written for one reach outlet and can republish them across a lot of other ones. So giving them in theory, a sort of, a new geographical nosing on it that, it's a story about something that's happening in Liverpool, but you resell it to people in Birmingham, or things like that.
But the problem, I've heard from people within reach with that is that it has a tendency to work like a thesaurus. And you can't just pluck words from a thesaurus without some human involvement, you, you, need to make sure they are the appropriate word, not the inappropriate word.
So it will tend to introduce, one of the things I've had cited, and this is anecdotal, is the, It can't quite tell the difference between category B drugs and category A drugs, which is quite important in court reports of people who are being charged with selling drugs. and even the on occasion, and I have no idea whether these actually made it too publication or not, or whether they were spotted.
it was introduced the names of completely erroneous crown courts and things, quite important details. It just, it muddles up in the way that, are not entirely trained and still quite experimental technology might be expected to.
There was something about a Boulder Rising software that had taken the name of the, Enola gay, the us, the plane that was used to drop the atomic problems and renamed it the Enola homosexual.
That was it is. What it reminded me of is actually, I remember Jane, you writing these stories years ago about when, spam filters first came in their, they're untested and, not entirely reliable form. And, I remember you did a story about the Horneman Museum in South London. Yes.
Yes. any organization that had a, a rude word anywhere in its, title was, was being affected such as Scunthorpe Town council. Yep.
are we assuming that AI will sort all this out and that within a year or five minutes or whatever the timescale is with ai, that it will be perfect and it will essentially no longer need humans? So the choice will be, do we want humans to do anything? Is that the dilemma? I think that's
the fear, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. these things do get better. That's that, that, that, is a problem of 15 years ago, isn't it? The one we gave the example there of spam filters, they're still not entirely reliable, but these things do. And I'm just gonna drop in the word algorithm here as I understand one here. But they do, learn things and they do get better at these things.
And in that sense, making, reasonably reliable newspaper archives that have some sort of authority to them available for the training models rather than, as I say, just the sort of nonsense that churn that's turned out on various dodgy websites. A very good story in the, latest edition of the Eye, which I thought was really interesting, which is about, Russian use of AI for propaganda.
And the idea that actually because of the way that these models train now, you don't even need to get it out there and read by lots and lots of people. You can just, through very clever search engine optimization and kind of, bumping up your fake news websites, persuade the bots that they are reliable and then the bots crawl all over them and the stuff doesn't get read on your, dodgy initial website, but it then turns up in, in the AI assisted results on Google, as reliable stuff.
So actually, the move towards newspapers doing deals. In order to have reliable information out there that these things are training on probably is quite a good one.
that is better than, the Russians training the bots. Yes. That is a better bet.
That's essentially it. If they're crawling all over, other countries guardian stories and Ft stories that probably is better than them crawling all over dodgy Russian websites. Yeah,
we long had the issue of circular confirmation where something would be in a newspaper article and therefore become part of the footnotes of Wikipedia and then be referenced by a newspaper article and then be referenced in the footnotes on Wikipedia. And the source became its own source repeatedly. Yeah.
Yes. It was one of my proudest boasts in journalism. It still is that I got the rules of Wikipedia changed. 'cause we pointed this out. Oh, this is about 20 years ago now, and I was contacted by a slightly shamefaced editor from Wikipedia who said, okay, alright, yes, no, you've made us look silly. Now we're gonna change these rules. We're gonna look at change.
But is there likelihood of the rules changing that a bot has to be checked? a friend in journalism pointed me to a, an advertisement for a reporter, one year contract. And the job was to write pieces in order to train ai. That's literally, would you like to dig your own grave? and then fill it in, bring your own spade, isn't it? And, I can see the argument. It's helpful to have a proper reporter training it, but you're just wiping yourself out, aren't you? I think
what worries me is the idea that it's going to, it's going to go the way of the supermarket till where you will have one person overseeing a load of tills. and they'll come over and help you out if there's a problem. But fundamentally, shoplifting has gone up a lot since that has been introduced. it is brought its own problems with it.
And then, I can see there might be a case for some of the, sort of the most rudimentary reporting, which almost programmatic language, like I'm thinking weather reports, things like this. Yeah. maybe not needing, a full human involvement. But then again, the question is where that line No, we've gotta rebalance,
we've got four reporters here saying that, the case against AI is pretty much conclusive and that we don't need it. Yeah,
out outside of journalism, we've seen issues where AI systems entrench biases, like when it was making, probation decisions and it's basic, its decisions on past probation decisions. but it just every iteration around the system, it got a bit more racist because there'd been some initial racism in the way that those decisions were made. but every time you ran an ai, it deepened that and worsened the problem.
So it wasn't making unbiased decisions, it was taking the human bias and multiplying it every time it ran.
And that presumably is the effect. If you have state agents involved in ai, they put. What they want to hear into ai, the Russians, the Chinese, whoever. and then that deepens.
Yeah. Every time it comes across it, it confirms it to itself. So it just comes around the next time and tells itself that was definitely right the last time. That
is identical to the Wikipedia problem that you identified. But there were various people who would ring up and, or that would contact Wikipedia and change their own birthday if they were a public figure. And Wikipedia had got it wrong. And someone said, yeah, but I've got a copy of the paper here that, that says it's the 12th of August, so sorry. Yeah. No, it is true. Now. That absolutely is so that's not been sought.
But the government does have an AI bill, which is planning as far as I can tell, to completely open the doors to all of this stuff legitimize the large scale use of, I would think of copyrighted texts too.
it may be too late for this because the other thing that's emerged since the last issue in the Atlantic, the other paper, which our esteemed and absent colleague Helen Lewis works for never heard of, was that, mark Zuckerberg's meta. Have simply gone ahead and stolen a load of copyrighted materials, books, which they've used to train their own ai I ai models on. it's, it probably, and I should say for the benefit of the private eye lawyer who will be looking over this before it goes out.
It's not quite, he's a robot accurate to don't worry about him. Yeah, we could look at getting, some AI from that, that would save us some money, wouldn't it? No. For the benefit of the lawyer, I'm not accusing, mark Zuckerberg thi being a thief, he's actually, receiving stolen goods because this is an entire library called Lib Gen, which is just made up of pirated books. millions and millions of them.
And, the, Atlantic fan memos within Meta, which simply said that it looked like it would be, Unreasonably expensive to actually pay any of the authors of these books to, trade to, for the use of their work to train AI on. So they simply lifted this entire already illegal library lib gen, and they've stolen, all of my books. I checked they've stolen all of yours as well, Andy, get out. They have, they've stolen the private annual that's in there as well. Now this is serious.
They've also stolen an awful lot of your other books. Ian, which I discovered were all about the Catholic liturgy. And then I looked at the publication dates on them and they were all from the 1950s. So I didn't all
theologian relative.
That was my big discovery. What's your question,
Adam? That sounds absolutely bang on. Look, I was younger then.
I did. I quite seriously. But wanted to check is just being stolen and that was also what the newspapers were very big on. You remember last month? the front pages right across all of the national papers, except I think the FT and all of the local papers as well saying, copyright law is there for a reason. the writers and creators and artists or anyone just should not have their work ripped off by very, rich tech companies, in order to train things that eventually are gonna put us all at jobs.
Anyway.
That's very disappointing to hear that, that, our books were all on there.
it's never the most sympathetic spectacle I know no people complaining about something because it's put them out of work. the poor old Luddites, people didn't like them much and they don't like it much when we point this out, but. It is amazing. Wide scale theft. Yes. And when the Chinese, deep seek appeared, and then all the tech bros said, you've stolen our material. It did make us all laugh. Oh yeah. Because it's all Presto as we say now. . Adam: Do you want some good news?
Yeah. , Adam: because so little of private eyes material is online. The bots cannot train themselves on it. They have not got a clue. So I asked Preemptively thinking of my own career chat, GPT last week, write a story about the guardian in the style of private eyes, street of shame section. It's got a headline on it. The Guardian's Guardian Angel, A Street of Shame Exclusive, which as is how we start off sounds. Hang on. Yeah. Okay. I'm embarrassed already. Here's your intro.
In the ever bustling streets of Lefty v, home of the Wokes, the guardian stands tall as a bastion of progressive journalism. Or so it likes to think, but recently it seems that the paper's reputation is slipping faster than an unpaid intern's ability to secure a byline. That's good stuff. What do you reckon, Ian? Straight in with this one. that lefty V The most worrying thing about this, I have to say, is
that it was based on a complete, bit of fiction because the story it pitched to me was, about the guardian introducing a premium rate, paywall on their website, which is something that simply has not happened So not only did it write it in the wrong style, it's just making facts up as well, which is sort limey
Okay. We come now to our second story this week. Jane, the last edition of the Sunday Times had as its front page, very exclusive investigation, a big story. About fraud, in student loans.
It did.
Yeah. And this was, I'm sure, news to you.
Wow. It was a little bit familiar, really. Okay. The story is that, a lot of universities, franchise out some of their courses to, other providers. These are private colleges and business schools and things like that. And, turns out, a lot of them are just running, scams to get student loans, not necessarily providing anything like the courses that, they're advertising.
talk me through how the, where the student loan goes and who's benefiting from it. Yeah.
a, student loan, hard as it is for, actual real students to, to pay back in, be a significant financial, drain for, young people. But, it is, a good loan rate if you were just trying to finance things especially if you're never planning to pay it back and write it off and the student loan company's not gonna be able to pursue you because perhaps you've taken it to another country. then, getting a student loan is, is a great way to get some money fast.
is it the fault of the institutions which are taking on these students who are perhaps less qualified or, not willing to pay back the loan? Or is it the fault of the people who the students quote unquote students who are applying?
I think there's some blame to spread around. Certainly actual fraudsters are the first kind of line. Yeah. however, there's very long been an issue with universities not keeping a close in a fight. On their franchised providers. and this goes back years in terms of private, I writing about the issue with franchise providers long before the, fraud issue specifically came up.
We've talked about some of the terrible pseudoscience quackery courses that they were actually a sort of allowing to be accredited under their names. We had things like, animal chiropractic and, homeopathy degrees being signed off by Bay Universities. But the courses were being run by these separate providers, and the universities just tick the books. Yes, you can have a degree with our crest on it. a lot of work was done on, reducing the amount of that. There's still some of it out there, and
that's the way of the university getting some money in because they don't have to run the course in animal homeopathy or whatever it might be,
but they still get some, tuition money for that.
Okay. I would say this is yet another woke lefty, attack on the very fine business of outsourcing, which privatize seems to write about endlessly. it just doesn't work very well. In the education field, does it
well? no. so again, not new that, courses have, turned out to be fraudulent. a few years back, Ofsted was, looking at, one in, further education, a college, and discovered that many of the students that were registered for this college not only weren't doing the course, but hadn't even heard of the college. Wow. They were just, odd list of names stuck on a register so that they could claim more money from the funding bodies.
does the money go to the outsourced provider? Does it go to the student themselves? How does it work?
And this is a student loan fraud, not tuition fee. there's, there's whole other issues going on with where the tuition fees go and and universities have different deals with different providers, In terms of whether they're having a partnership or a franchise deal. But in terms of the student loan fraud, that's the student's relationship with the student loans company.
But if you are doing organized crime, then you can set up a course and get a organized group of people to lend their names to claiming lots and lots of loans. Yeah. and this is where we come back to the, Sunday time story is, not news to private eye as just over a year ago we wrote about this happening, the University of Northampton, and one of its franchise providers. they found that. 600 students had effectively submitted the same coursework.
Oh, I, when that happens, at which point they, they asked some questions, oh, are these students real? Yeah. Are they attending the course? what's going on there? at this point reported themselves. at least they found out it's, so
what Northampton University, Northampton
reported themselves to the office of students So this is how we found about it, because they had to put a line in their annual report saying that they were going to have to pay, 6.1 million pounds back in terms of tuition fees. Wow. So it was clearly, and you
spotted this with your eagle eye, 6 million pounds. That's being slightly unlikely.
it was, what was helpfully flagged up was that the National Audit Office did a report on issues with the student loans company. And although they anonymized it, they did make a note that one university had, ah, had an issue where they'd spotted a 6.1 million. Fraud, which made it a lot easier to look for because they gave the exact amount to look for in the university accounts.
I'm just imagining whoever had the job of marking all that coursework. 'cause they would've had an unbelievably easy time of it. Very good. This is similar. And so that was a franchised thing at the University of Northampton. Yeah. that wasn't in-house, that was exterior. What is to stop the four of us doing this now? Let's say the four of us approached the University of Buckingham or wherever, just using them as an example.
And we say, look, we've got this great course in, should we say investigative journalism, should we say sat, satirical journalism. Satirical journalism. Satirical journalism. That sounds good. Invite a lot of students to take part in this. How do, how does that relationship work? Do we know this sounds like a trip to Romania? that's the thing, isn't it? A lot of it is, Romanian based or the recent fraud. S in terms
of money having left the country, that does appear to be where, significant amounts set off to. Yes. Okay.
so the, students from an unknown. Possibly EU country. Yeah. Come over. They take out the loan at the end of it, someone says, you don't appear to have attended any courses. And they say, oh, I was working from home and you can pick it up. And they sent me the texts. and presumably quite difficult to prove.
And in the meantime, they've, got a loan, which they possibly have no intention of paying back, or, even if they did, if they've had a loan at extremely beneficial rates compared to a bank loan, they haven't actually been a student for that would still be fraud. But in the case of these particular, what sort of, scams? Yeah. These are just find a list of people who are willing to have their names put on a, list.
It seems an incredibly obvious scam in higher education. I'm not saying that. they're worse at spotting it. But shouldn't it have been detected a bit earlier?
universities can be very, proud of their global reach and their kind of their London campus and, by being more than just University of Muggles v then they now have courses all over the place and their name is getting out there and they're,
and a lot of universities we should say as well, are in pretty dire financial straits at the moment, aren't they? So they do need to be considering ways of getting money in to keep the doors open at all, don't they?
they are getting some, income through these deals. that's just
what I was going to ask you, Shane. In terms of the scam, the, four of us are gonna start running. how are we gonna benefit from that financially, please? The tuition fees. we get the tuition fees. They get the
cheap loans. We get the tuition fees. Okay, great. We don't provide any teaching, so there's no costs. we don't have the seats for it. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah.
But there's so many times who, who did this piece quite well. they, had some funny pictures of these sort of outsourced teaching institutions that appeared to be above a chip shop or a couple of chairs, or a brass plaque somewhere.
Yeah. Absolutely. Studied Wizarding world. University of American Hard can, yes,
I think Eastern University of Carpets is, the classic,
isn't it? He's working at the number one vape shop in the whole of the country. We're very depressed. Yeah.
If people say, oh, I'm not gonna pay the student loan back, is that because the figures suggest that lots of people don't?
Yeah. genuine students often are not paying them back. Obviously it depends on their, income. And, a lot don't manage to, to earn enough to be paying, student loan back, for a long time, if at all. or they managed to lose people in the system that aren't gonna pay them back. in particular, if you're just a, fraudulent name on a list, then you're gonna be quite hard to find because, we don't know exactly how accurate the information they're getting about people is.
And this sort of thing looks less unusual 'cause all sorts of universities are opening weird campuses overseas and things. Anyway. You've written a lot about that haven't you, Jane?
Absolutely. universities are constantly trying to extend their reach and build their empires and open their, campuses in dubious regimes. And, perhaps if you were just the university in one city with sort of one structure, you might be able to keep a better eye on your overall finances and what you're putting your name to.
You suggesting growth isn't always good, Jane?
I think I am. Yeah, I think growing in Kazakhstan or, it might be worth having a second think about.
so this has been. Crack down on is going to be cracked down on, as Ian asks, is it? Yeah.
It's going to be investigated. Okay. By the, the public sector fraud investigation body, although they, very much knit around and ask the people at the National Audit Office who did the investigation last year. And a previous investigation in about 2017 and a previous investigation in about 2012, the, National Audit Office, I've been banging on about this for a while, that it's, a massive risk with the way student loans work is that, you can.
Wander off with your full student loan, and never pay it back and not to do a course.
And so this predates all of the Covid loans stuff that's still being looked into, doesn't it? This is, a very long running thing that suddenly we had, Sunday Times stories, unlike Private Island. Ones came with the column from Bridget Phillips and the education Secretary saying, it's time to crack down on this sort of thing. Yes.
Yeah. the government has recognized it needs to crack down on it. They've been running a consultation on how to crack down on it since January.
that's the answer. Consultations all around. They're trying to work it out.
Okay. That's it for this episode of page 94. Thank you so much to all of you for listening. We'll be back again in a fortnight with another one. Just a reminder, if you want to send in a question for page 94 live, the Royal Abbo, sorry, Cambridge Literary Festival, you just emailed [email protected]. thanks very much for listening. Thanks to everyone for participating and thanks to rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.