Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye Office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop. It's too hot. At least two of the members of this podcast have breached the Shorts Rubicon.
but we're going to try and cool ourselves down by taking ourselves north, several hundred miles to Scotland, where Nicholas Sturgeon, uh, former first minister for what was over eight years, last seen, I think by a lot of listeners to this podcast, or lots of people who are even, you know, pretty up with the news, um, being arrested before being released, uh, and having a crime scene tent erected in her garden, all sorts of fun stuff.
She has written a new memoir, which has been, received as being very frank. In fact, it's called frankly, it's, uh, had a lot of serialization, a lot of hype, and it seems to be a chance to appraise the whole kind of Sturgeon project such as it was or is. And the fact the whole of the SMP and Ian, you have a special expertise of this 'cause you spent many years receiving lots of correspondence from readers north of the border, I believe.
Yes. a lot of Scottish readers wrote in over the last decade saying, why don't you cover Scotland? And then whenever we covered Scotland, they said, you patronizing bastards. Why don't you leave Nicola Sturgeon alone? Um, you have no idea. Uh, what a great leader she is, certainly compared to yours. Do you want Boris Johnson slash whoever is in Theresa May she? Soon. Now we've got Nicola Sturgeon. so the correspondence, which again, doesn't say that anymore, there was a fairly dramatic reversal.
Um, but this, I think is, is an attempt to, certainly an attempt by, um, Nicholas Sturgeon to rehabilitate herself. , And again, any memoir that says frankly on it, is gonna get people to say, well, really, um, and I noticed one of the blurbs said Alan Johnson former, uh, labor Home Secretary, he said, um, he described the quality of the book as unflinching honesty, and even on the, , extracts, which I've read.
I, I feel politicians should remember when talking about other politicians that their standards of unflinching honesty aren't necessarily ours. I remember one of the quotes, from Nicholas Sturgeon was about the SNP finances, and she said at one point, we're not talking about the finances. There's nothing wrong with the finances. I mean, she was a cos signatory of the SNP finances with, with her husband and with the treasurer, Colin Beatie.
Um, so, there are questions to be addressed and whether they are, I'm. I'm Obviously very interested in the money 'cause I found the camper Van very funny and the one of the longest police investigations ever. Um, which the Scottish police were a trifle slow. Having a look into the finances of the governing party running Scotland, the reasons that are not fully discussed so far in the extract.
I mean, Helen will talk about the other, um, integrity and honesty issues, um, in, in, in the Scottish government. But I think, so far we've had a, a, a bit of a gush on this book. and I'll be interested to see where it goes.
Can we just remind ourselves what the camper Van was?
So the camper Van was, uh, allegedly, uh, purchased with money that was supposed to go, there was supposed to be ring fenced, wasn't it, for a second
was whether or not it was a campaign vehicle, essentially that was whether or not it was for official purposes only or whether or not it was being, to use to tour the Highlands and Islands, I
But it turned out to be parked on the driveway of Peter Mull Nichols, Sturgeon's husband and chair of the SMPs um, a mother, yeah. Yes. Who, and she I think was about 92 and didn't drive, certainly didn't drive large camper Van. So it all did look
Yeah. And they did actually have the battle bus, the SMP. So this would've been a reserve battle bus.
Well, often, often a super yacht will have another yacht behind it, won't it, to carry the boring things in the staff, you know? So I think that all sounds
fine. I mean, we should say, um, Peter Morrow's still under investigation. He appeared in court in March and, and to no plea. He's got, um, talking about the camp fund being impounded. He's got legal aid. He was just granted last month because his assets are frozen and he's unemployed.
So are the charges that are being
He, yeah, he's, he's still care basing charges. Against Sturgeon there is no further investigation nor against, uh, Colin Beatie. But yeah, she talked about that as you know, saying it was, it was incredibly traumatic being under investigation. It was the worst time of her life. And then there's a delicious little sentence in it where she says, nothing I am saying here reflects on anyway about Peter's situation. You think, oh, it's a bit harsh. You were, you weren't married to him.
You could probably be a bit more effusive in your praise for him. They're now in the process. They're separated in the process of divorcing. But Ian, you're exactly right. The thing always has, has been annoying about this all the way along is that she would say it's very un feminist to define me in terms of my husband. And people would go, your husband is the chief executive of the SNP, of which you are leader. Like this is, this is a relevant thing that journalists might wanna talk about.
But from my point of view, the thing that's fascinating when you talk to people in Scotland, one thing that comes up is that the s and p was too dominant and the Scottish political culture and, and, uh, was too small and homogenous. The s and p got kind of into a one party state. But you know, the way that Hollywood was designed was with the proportional vote was designed so that you'd usually have coalitions, but they went through a long period where they were just supremely dominant.
And then all cultural organizations, you know, knew they had to be within the favor of the s and p. All the charities knew that, you know, all of that. It was just, you know, she was not to mention
the civil service and the police. Yeah, I just throw that in. right.
But she was kind of, essentially it was King Alex, and then it was Queen Nicola. And I think that just made for a really unhealthy political culture in Scotland.
And the extracts do go into the, um, the row between Alex Salmon, who was her mentor, and Nicola Sturgeon. And I mean, she does say at one point, you know, ours was the most successful partnership in Scottish politics. And you think, well, not, not at the end, it wasn't.
No. Um, and there is, there's a real problem in that I noticed the Scottish newspapers are having a bit of a row because she suggested now that he's dead, um, that he leaked, uh, some of this information to a newspaper, which the newspaper has denied. Um, and are you unflinching transparency and honesty when you're having a go at someone from beyond the grave? Is, Is that fair?
Oh yeah. I mean, the reaction to it has been very sharply divided. Remember, not least because of the, the, the charges against Alex Salmon, which of which he was acquitted of all of them. That plus the gender hours. What caused the break off of Alba? The breakaway independence party.
That was then, and, and that took lots of both SMP activists, sort of middle-aged women who had been the backbone of the SMP, walked out into Alba, which was always a strange thing at the time to go, you know, go into a party led by a guy who was then under investigation for sex Yeah. That was salmon's party. That was salmon's party. That was salmon's party, but that they were so teed off with Nicola Sturgeon.
The way she handled the gender route, I think was what the main problem, more than just her attitude to it, which is that she just said anyone who disagreed with her was illegitimate. She said at one point that anyone who disagreed with her on self-identification of gender was actually racist, which was a very rogue allegation to bring in. I mean, you could see, you know, transphobic or sexist or whatever. So they, they were basically just. Straight up reactionaries, 1950s reactionaries.
That's the only reason anyone would disagree with her. And that caused a huge amount of ill feeling. 'cause people didn't just feel disagreed with, they felt disrespected by her. And that's why I think, as you're saying in the reactions has been so strong. It's not just that people disagree with her, it's just they feel that she was pious and domineering and that that, and anyone who disagreed with her was illegitimate. Which first came up in the context of it, independence, right?
The idea that anyone who didn't vote s and p or didn't want independence was talking Scotland down. You didn't believe in Scotland enough to believe that it could be independent. So there was, people felt that they were, you know, being told that their views are illegitimate. And that, and then that same feeling ported onto to gender as well.
And in the gender row, it wasn't, um, uh, English liberals or English reactionaries or English transphobes. It was Scottish women. Um, and so that made certainly the, the, the previous, um, set of assumptions that anyone who criticizes Nicola Sturgeon is either not patriotically, Scottish or English, uh,
But that's the framing that they wanted to have. When, um, the gender recognition reform bill was passed, voted for by all of the parties except the Scottish Conservatives, which would've brought in self id, it was then blocked by Alistair Jack, the conservative Scottish secretary. So that point, it was very neat for the SMP that they were saying, you know, reactionary old toy voting, England has once again blocked Scottish enlightened progressivism.
But as you say, there's a brilliant anthology called The Women Who Wouldn't Wish, which is by all of these activists who did unbelievably large amounts of unpaid work because the civil servants was just completely on board with the entire search and agenda. But yeah, it was always presented as being essentially evil Tory, old England versus liberal enlightened Scotland. And that's, that was the framing that really appealed to the SMP during those years.
And it, it became accepted in England during COVID in particular because, any broadcast by Boris was followed by a broadcast by Nicola Sturgeon in which she looked, not like him. Yeah. And, and that was plenty.
Yeah, I, I know what you mean. I think she did have a final renaissance was during COVID because the feeling was that she was taking it very seriously. She was being sober. And in contrast to Boris Johnson saying in March, 2020, I'm still out there shaking hands, you know, whatever that said that she did, then I think go too far the other way, which now people are criticizing her for. So Scotland for example, kept schools closed longer. Um, you know, she had more virus restrictions.
So, but then those arguments, I mean you can see it's still in America now are still playing on about exactly how quickly restrictions should have been lifted.
and once that reputation she'd got for being much more marvelous than anything that was going on in English, it meant no criticism was acceptable. So the Iran pieces about these two ferries that took decades to produce staggering millions, and then they make HS two begin to look fast. Um, it, it's not a specifically English problem.
And there were problems in Scotland, uh, with education, um, with drugs, with leveling up, all of which were just buried under this assumption that because you are not an English Tory, therefore you are a huge success.
So this is what I wanted to ask about really, is there seems to be at the heart of s and p government they're making two big offers to the electorate, as it were, The first of which is, we're gonna run Scotland better than, Westminster politicians can possibly run us. And the second is independence. And those both seem to have fallen short.
I mean, obviously the independence referendum in 2014, there's been a consistent attempt to say, we're gonna have another referendum, we're going to get an A concession from Westminster, that we will have another one of these. And the support for independence, I think is about, is roughly where it has been for some years, which is about 50%. You know, it's pretty close either way, but the odds of another referendum seem quite slim at the
John Sweeney, current first minister does not seem to be holding it out as the kind of shining grail over the hill in the way that I think both salmon and Sturgeon did. And, and you are right in post 'cause you remember immediately after the affair referendums 2014 and then the 2015 election, general election, the s and p just cleans up. It's just a wipe out across Scotland. So there was this sense that although they'd lost the referendum, they had won this sort of larger moral victory, I think.
But that's been eroded, you know, their power sharing agreement with the greens collapsed. Um, we lost, uh, hums Yusef in, you know, didn't last very long as first minister. They're in a much more kind of humble position than they were, and I think that's why. Probably, I mean, I also think Nicholas Sturgeon has wanted to write this memoir because she's a genuine lover of literature and, and books and reading like that. I don't think that is famed for the cameras at all.
She's one of the few people who still reads literary fiction with genuine pleasure. But I, I am really kind of fascinated because it, as Ian's saying, it's, it's. Billing itself was kind of complete transparency, but she doesn't actually want to concede that she was wrong in uh, uh, in anything that I've seen her doing. The gender era being really obvious, right, in that there was a rabbi about sending a biologically male rapist to a woman's prison.
And she said at the time, you know, I don't, I, you know, the individuals a rapist when asked if they were man or a woman. And now she sort of says, well, probably, actually, probably I got that one wrong. And you're like, but okay, well if you think you did maybe get that one wrong, why did you think it was completely illegitimate for anyone to disagree with you at the time? Explain what changed your mind and what you'd like to say to the people on the other side of that debate.
This is the bit, maybe this is in the book, we haven't read it. That comes out on Thursday, but that's what, that's the bit I'm struggling with at the moment.
the joke in the eyes always, all political memoirs should be called, I Was Right and Everyone else was wrong. And this one is being billed as, this isn't like, um, other political memoirs and what I've read so far, it is, um, uh, she was right about nearly everything and possibly for perfectly good reasons wrong about various other things and some other things she can't talk about, uh, because there's still an ongoing investigation. So. Frankly, yeah.
Ish is, is part of this just the kind of inevitable tension between having run somewhere for nearly 20 years, which is how long the s and p have been in office in Scotland under their various leaders. And now that's the sort of time span over which you would expect to have memoirs coming out saying, well, this is what it was like when I was in, and this is, you know, this is why I made the decisions I did and why they've turned out the way they have.
But the s and p is still in office, so it's sort of not quite a natural time for this book to be out. Now you'd, you'd normally have that after an election that's gone the other way.
And I think because this. The police investigation into the, you know, the hierarchy of the governments running the country took so long and was so delayed and, and, in the end managed not to date, to have got very far, um, in terms of explaining what happened with any of this, um, everyone was quiet, so they didn't publish their own memoirs. I haven't read books about what it was like to be at the center of, this near one party state. How did that feel? Where, where are those books?
Uh, they're not there, are they?
I mean, David Torrance wrote biographies of both Salmon and Sturgeon, which are very good, um, and worth reading if you're interested in scholarship politics. But actually, I haven't read the Insiders View in the way that you might have a. Like an Alan Johnson or a Chris Mullen or somebody like that. And that would be really fascinating to read.
Yeah, let alone a, a Sasha Swire, uh,
or a, um,
Mrs. Gove. Um, and that would be interesting 'cause the, it's a very small group of people who were in power. They were all very, very close to each other. , The Alex Salmon affair, which was, um, you know, he was, , investigated then. He was tried, and then he was cleared on all charges, though his barrister said he, he could have been a better man. But these were all people, they all knew really well.
And if you're gonna do a book called, Frankly, the idea that you didn't discuss this all the time with your husband, who just happened to be in charge of the party as well, and all your other friends. This, this won't wash. Well, maybe it is
actually should have been called, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn, but the publisher said, maybe just trim that down a bit. Everyone needs an editor.
It's a bit lighter. It reminds me of, you remember the, the flats in Bristol that Sheree Blair purchased and um, and, and, and, and, and the excuse then, 'cause they turned out, she'd bought them with the help of a, of a convicted fraudster. And the excuse then was, well, she'd never talked to Tony about it. And all right, in that case, it wasn't a formal thing.
You know, they, they weren't the, the, you know, the, the, the CEO and the leader of a political party, but they weren't married to the idea that you, you buy a flat for your eldest son when he goes away to university, but you never mention anything to your husband at talk. People do talk about these things on a domestic level, let alone the kind of corporate level that they, that, that they would've had to have done
so there's an election coming up next year. I think it's gonna be by May, 2026. And it's gonna be a slightly strange one because there'll probably be a big new Reform presence that there wasn't before. I mean, if it goes like the, the by-election they've just had, um. Which I see which labor won, despite lots of predictions, they wouldn't. So where does it go from here?
I mean, if support for independence is at 50%, but support for the s and p is about a third, which is where it roughly is, which is about enough for a minority government, as you say, Helen, perhaps what the system was designed for or built with a mine, but not enough for a majority government. What comes
Well, it is built the Hollywood system to give pe smaller parties a foothold. So you wouldn't be at all surprised to see Reform making a, a breakthrough there and getting some um, some representation. The greens are, Scottish Greens are maybe my favorite political party 'cause they just, um, they fall out with each other with extraordinary.
The latest thing is that one of the guys who's going for co-leader there is, is now says he had to be hospitalized 'cause he was bullied so badly by the other people in the Scottish Greens. I mean yeah, it's extraordinary. I mean, just for very small you think Wind farms, can anyone get that heated about them? You're talking to Andy. Well, yeah. Okay. me. Yeah, Yes you will. But yeah. But, but, so yes, I, I, I think it will be very interesting.
I think the Scottish conservatives are probably gonna get squeezed out by a form in the same way that they will be probably here. Um, and labor in Scotland haven't, you know, they're neither a strongly unionist party, although they are technically unionist, nor are they. Distinct in social terms as much from the sm MP as, you know, as, as they voted, for example, the Gender Recognition Reform Act and stuff like that.
So Anna Swa has been trying to edge away from the ultra version of social progressivism that the SMP had, but he's neither, he hasn't gone full Kia Starer like I the left me, um, either. So it's gonna be a really unpredictable set of elections, I would say.
But we started with saying that the SMP had become a one party state, and that was always the criticism of Scottish labor, that it operated like a giant personal fiefdom up there. So. In a sense, I'm trying to be more progressive here. , We are getting to situation where it won't be one lot who entirely, defend and, identify that the the only narrative acceptable. Oh,
I absolute think the best possible thing that could happen is that, uh, that there is a, a wider spread of parties represented because, as you say, Andy s and p support, yes, there's a, it's a really significant chunk of Scotland, but there's also a lot of right wing people in Scotland who have not been very well represented and that that kind of might just be bubbling under in an unpleasant way. Um, I think it would be much better for, there's
a lot of unionist people who Yeah. also didn't who aren't necessarily right wing Yeah.
But you just
don't believe in
Right. But that, but I, I think more the, the problem that I always felt with that is that it, it had kind of meant that if you wanted to get a grant from the Scottish government, you had to follow a particular way of doing things, right. If you were a charity boss and you had to be very friendly with the SMP, that kind of stuff, just because Scotland's political culture was just smaller than England's was more accentuated. It's a problem everywhere. Right.
But it was a particularly acute problem in Scotland, I think.
But the Scottish conservatives led by Russell Finley, exon journalist, I think it was ex journalist. No, no, no, no, no. Ex ex son, crime correspondent. That's just a PAC I throw in there. They're still doing that experiment with, uh, having newspaper people in, in leading political parties, which didn't work out so brilliantly for us, This, it's the side of the border,
now we come onto, uh, section two of today's show, which is §all about the exciting news. I'm sure everyone listening is aware, but there's a new version of chat, GPT out. Uh, so if you want to ask for a recipe or the capital of, uh, Mongolia or you know, a novel maybe to be written so you can put your name on it. Chat. GPT is there and is willing to help. But there is a problem, isn't there, Helen? Because it has been launched with something called Reduced sco. Fancy.
Well, so the new model that's out is chat GBT five, and it's got, actually, you're pretty pleased now I find that it's got, it's got four new personalities, which I thought matched up with the personalities of people on this podcast. Guess who's who? You ready? Cynic Robot listener, A nerd.
Uh, well, is is it listener for me? Obviously
Now get your bids in
early, I'll throw myself on
the nerve.
Nerd Ade. I was gonna say,
that's the one we're fighting over
here, isn't it?
And partly this is to address the fact that there was a version of the previous, uh, iteration that came out in April that was toos of Fantic. And it just was like, go team. Go girl. You go girl. And people would be like, you know, I think there are voices coming through the walls, and it'd be like, such a great point. Definitely believe that.
So they wound it back in and this kind of caused, uh, you know, outpourings of grief on reddit forums dedicated to chat GPT people saying, you've taken away my friend. Um, we know lots of people are using it for life coaching, for therapy.
There is also a, a a kind of amusing trend to me of people using it to, to they think come up with new theories or revolutionize physics, which when I was researching my book Con Genius, it is a constant motif of people who've gone a bit funny that they think they're about to revolutionize physics. So Travis Kanick, formerly of Uber revealed on a podcast recently. I
mean He was a driver.
uh, CCEO and found it. Yeah. I, I'll go down this thread with GBT or gr, that's Elon last one, and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics. And then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics. I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.
Okay.
Doesn't down, Wow, everyone. My favorite Reddit comment on this was someone who replied, dude just reinvented smoking weed with your friends in Right? There's
to unpack there,
I enjoyed,
but basically it seems to be, you talked to chat GPT and it keeps saying, what a masterful idea, sir. Uh, God, you're so wise and handsome, Yeah. And it it might be, there are all sorts of. Arenas in which that doesn't matter too much. Like if you're asking what's the capital of Mongolia? Yeah. And there are lots of other arenas where it might matter a bit more. Like cases where, for example, people ask for romantic advice. You know, should I break up with my partner?
This is what I think of the matter, or should I stop taking my medication? And, um, if it replies only with affirmation, it gets really dangerous. And that these people who think they've invented new kinds of maths have in, have been involved in dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours of conversation with this thing. So naturally they think it's real. Mm-hmm.
Because it, as in it sounds so crazy to think, oh, I've, I've read reinvented maths despite not having a, a high school degree, which is what happened to a man in
Two big stories. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have both had stories which are eerily similar, beat for beat in that they're people who ask it a question about maths and then they get talking to it, and then they kind of get lulled into this belief that they've got. One of them had this idea that numbers of fluid not static, another one had thought he'd smashed through cryptography, you know, and they would just get all this kind of constant feedback and, and chat logs.
Both of these people handed over their chat logs. The chat logs will say things like, you know, am I going mad? And they'd be like, just because you're asking that is proof. How sane you are, and it will never contradict them. One of the guys managed to get himself out of it by asking Gemini, which is the Google one, like, is any of this real? And it went, no. Basically no. What do you want about?
But yeah, they do have this, they have this problem, which is they lure people into, and this is only a small percentage of people. Lots of people are using them perfectly normally, but for people who are susceptible to kind of folly, duh, they can often end up just spending hours with them and end up with the kind of psychosis. Essentially. The person in the Wall Street Journal article was hospitalized with mania twice after talking for hours and hours and hours.
And this is something that both open AI and Anthropic, which makes Claude another model have spoken about. They're aware of it. They know that there are some people who just, you know, the same way that lots of people drink alcohol with no problems, but for some people they just become problem drinkers. Some people become problem LLM
users. So it's almost, it's like they're being groomed by
Yeah. Fact.
isn't it?
Well, Part of the problem is that they have the capacity to remember all of your previous conversations with them. That's, that's really what's going on here is let's go back to what I was talking about before, and they'll say, ah, yes. And they've, they've got, whereas
the rest of us
have forgotten because we were, we weren't listening. Exactly. And we've known people
long enough they
they say, I've got this great idea. You go, oh God, have you? Yeah.
Um,
so they, the New York Times plugged into the models. What, when this guy's, you know, what would happen if you said, well, I haven't eaten in, in an hours now is, 'cause I've been coming up with this, I think it's called Chronos, his new version of, uh, maths that he come up with chat. GBT said, you didn't burn out, you burned forward. So now eat something hydrate. Claude said, that's not weakness. That's what builders do. Now, please, for the love of Chrono, go eat something.
So they are telling you to go and eat something and that's
but in a kind of, but they all speak in this weird LinkedIn like cheer squad vocabulary. I find it really bizarre.
How, how can large language models like this be expected to protect every single user? Many of you might, you know, not have got into this state through chat GPT or through any large language model. Doesn't that seem incredibly difficult?
Mm, it is. So at the moment, they have a thing at the bottom, like chat. GPT will say chat. GPT makes mistakes. People are calling for them to have more reminders, um, and for them to be less default, kind of cheering about to people. One of the big arguments about whether or not they're optimized for engagement, OpenAI says no because essentially do they wanna keep you on the hook, like a sort of telephone scammer because that's good for them? Well, actually it's not really.
'cause they're losing money on every query. Um, so they, they deny this quite hotly. Other people are saying we should have kind of, you know, so people should have to kind of pass a kind of. By the way, this isn't real tests before they are allowed to use lms.
What like, are these traffic lights? or Right, How many bicycles are there here? And if they say 300,000 when they're two 'cause they redefined numbers,
then them. Yes. How many people have in their bedroom come up with a new fear of theory of physics independently? Click all the people who have, and if you click any of them, you know, are not allowed to use chat. GPT.
I think it's more like we're just gonna have to accept that this is something, if this technology persists, people should, in the same way that we've talked on this podcast a lot about online radicalization, people who spend huge amounts of time on Facebook or YouTube, whatever it might be. This is just the new version of that and it's, it's worse because we all, the research we have on radicalization says it happens faster when it's.
Interactive. And, and you'll know Andy, I was telling you earlier about the ISIS magazine, dbi Yes. Which is one of my
favorite named after Anton.
Yes. Anton Anton, DBI,
Right. okay. Which would be the
of Yeah. Strictly, um, Arabic reboot. Um, but anyway, but certainly,
dancing.
cartoon
last issue. Just checking.
but anyway, so that was, that. There was lots of interesting research about how that was, you know, that was a recruitment tool obviously, but it was not as, uh, radicalizing as say, internet forums where you get people and they'd start the lower end.
Or New York Times made a podcast called Rabbit Hole that showed you how people end up getting, you know, they start off looking at something fairly normal and then it, the algorithm feeds them more and more sort of cigarettes until they end up in something really truly deranged. And I just think this is something that if you've got a friend who seems to be spending a lot of time, if they've, for example, if they've given the chat, what they're talking to a name.
That's the point at which I would just have a gentle conversation about whether or not, Yeah. I saw a fantastic conversation between Paul Graham, who's a Silicon Valley investor. I normally quite rate and uh, Elise Yow is one of the big AI doomers saying that how terrible it wasn't their images from Gaza, they couldn't really work out what was true.
Both sides were putting out propaganda and if only they'd do one of these betting prediction markets like manifold so they could, people could bet on it or someone would come up with a really good AI to it. And I was like, I just was sitting in like reading Twitters and going
journalists, what? you wanted journalists, you've already But that is the thing that slightly amazes me, is the number of people who are relying on AI to give them answers that would actually would be perfectly accessible from technology that we've already got. I mean, things like Google and Google Maps and, and you know, or, or not but
not Google, AI
AI books, dictionaries, those sorts of things Well, oh yeah. The number of people who will look at a pic, there was some mad story on Twitter and they, so the replies will just be at gr Is this true? And people do treat it like, I think AI's got loads of uses as a tool, but people treat it as an Oracle.
Hmm. And I think that's the fundamental but Google itself as a search entity, is now encouraging people to do that because the first thing you get is the AI overview, whether you like it or not, it's impossible to switch it off. And that certainly in terms of the media, is having an enormous effect on, because no one is getting the click-throughs anymore at all, um, in what they're called the blue links. No one is looking down to these things at all.
I mean, it used to be that you had to scroll past a load of sponsored things before you got to anything remotely useful. But now you've literally got, and it fills most of the screen in on, on your phone. So that's, that's what people just take as gospel.
and Wikipedia is way down. So having, you know, been sneery about Wikipedia, at least it's quite human people and moderators and people Change it again. Oh, the, the Google AI overview. What.
So who, Wikipedia is maybe the best, it's one of the greatest information creations of the, of the century. I mean, it's just extraordinary. The the amount of expertise, the levels of verification,
no one source should be. Treated as an oracle, which is what
we are coming at this as four journalists, aren't we, who are used to doing research and, and, and kind of, um, interrogating sources and thinking about, you know, what's reliable and what, what is, and, and that sort of. Media literacy, technological literacy, I think is something that has, I mean, the number of people who just say, well, mentioned some story, and I say, well, where did you read that? Well, it was on the internet, but, but, but where on the internet?
You know, what was it in the, it was in the Times or on the BBC or was it just someone's Twitter feed? Was that, that sort of ability to to, to discriminate things was already disappearing If AI is now just saying it and, you know, well, GPT told me so it must be true. I think. um,
I mean, that's why I've spent, you know, years, turning up in schools and suggesting that part of any sort of, um, curriculum could be, um, some sort of media literacy package. Um, yes, it's great to do a civics course and you know how many seats there are in the American House of Representatives, but could you do a thing about what might and might not be a, a reliable source? Uh, when you get that, I think that would be pretty useful. In schools,
it's, uh, absolutely. And what's really interesting is seeing examples of where people have been using large language models. for for answers that you think they might not given you, you'd expect people to be really media literate and proficient in that kind of thing. So you know, Peter Kyle, who's the science and technology secretary, has, has said he's been using it to find out which podcasts to appear on, which I think is interesting.
the Swedish Prime Minister, LF Kristofferson, he has said he regularly uses chat EPT for a second opinion about decisions he's made on running the country. And I think you're really putting yourself, well, you to sort of second guess. But then again, whose model are you using? What are the assumptions that have gone into the LLM that you are using? And if you don't know that, you might get a different answer from chat DPT than you do from GR or, or one of the others.
I find that that really sad though, because I just, my instinct reaction is do people not have friends? And actually the, no, but that's a great good thing to say. But actually the problem is people don't, people have fewer friends. People consistently report in surveys that they don't feel that they have that many people they can talk to. We have a kind of antisocial crisis, a loneliness crisis.
And so I think people, and also if you spend a lot of time not with real people, with ai, you lose the ability to deal with the friction of actual people who might disagree with you and not want to listen to your theories about physics.
What an insightful point Helen. Really well made.
you. But also we've got, Actually chat. DBD doesn't come across that difference to your friend on WhatsApp. Like they
probably nicer. because they They'll listen to you for ages
ages I'm this, just ignore
your
and that is Helen's original point. I mean the idea that people, I go into echo chambers and only want to talk to people who agree with them entirely is 'cause they don't like this friction. And the friction is where you find out what things might and might not be true.
So OpenAI have acknowledged that this is a problem with their models? I think. I think they've said that, um, they're aware that delusional emotional dependency is something that it's failed to recognize, uh, in the past. And, you know, I think they're trying to work on it, but it does just seem really difficult. And just to bring it back to private eye, there's a story in the latest issue all about, uh, the independent Press standards organization, ipso.
They have issued a warning, uh, on their website saying, please do not draft your complaint to us using ai, because if you do that, it will come up with ipso clauses, which don't exist, which aren't real. So you will be writing an inaccurate complaint about an inaccuracy on a newspaper website.
which is possibly there because the journalist has relied on. AI to put it in there. Eventually, we're just gonna reach one where
it's a load of robots
complaining about other robots robots. Yeah. Yeah, it's extraordinary. so I saw recently, um, uh, uh, someone who was, uh, being potentially sued for libel. They'd had a letter before action and people recommending online they were trying to set up a sort of GoFundMe kind of thing to pay for potential legal fees. Luckily, they did not take up this advice, but several people going, you don't need a lawyer, just ask chat DPT to draft your response for you.
And I just thought, my god, the number of people I've seen go through legal cases, which have dragged on for years. And yeah, some of 'em sitting in this room dragged on for years and years and costs millions of pounds. You could potentially lose your house over this stuff. Do not trust Chatt that, for sake.
What can we do, Helen?
I shut it down. I come back to switching off the internet, which is just for an, just for a couple honestly. I actually, I was in Scotland last week and thanks to Storm Florist, the power on the internet went down and I didn't have any internet reception for 24 hours. Let me tell you, I wrote three operas, uh, knitted. No, actually It was, I was not. I read, I read a book. Do you remember them? Andy? Do remember Di Dimly. Yeah.
I would say that even the people who should know better are, are going down the same route. I mean, I've seen, uh, job adverts, well, one, one appointment at reach, PLC, who are the newspaper B em off, who do the mirror and express and the daily stuff, and about a hundred and something, uh, local papers through the country as well. They've just appointed a director of newsroom transformation, terrifying job title, specifically to further develop our editorial AI approach.
Um, the mail online, or as they're now called the Daily Mail, they have finally changed their name. The mail online is no more, but they're also looking, uh, currently advertising for an AI engineer to enhance newsroom efficiency. So, you know, these people who ought to be the guardians of this stuff and ought to know better, are increasingly thinking, well, we can do away with actual humans and, uh, and rely more and more on, uh, on AI stuff. So
So newsroom transformation, when someone says that you've gotta start counting the spoons, it's ne it's just oh yeah. that means you're getting exact, that. as simple Yeah. It's like efficiencies. Mm-hmm.
I mean, it does have lots of uses, doesn't it?
I find AI really interesting. It's, it's coming on really fun. I'm not a complete like skeptic, LLMs. Large language models are a specific instance and they're often what people think of. There's lots of other interesting stuff. It's very good, for example, promising results in spotting cancers very early from scans, things like that. The image generation has become incredibly much better even than with the space of a couple of years.
Code. Things like coding, definitely it's very good at, things are actually slightly repetitive. So, and it's fascinating because everybody involved in the industry is, knows lots of coders, right? So they're like, the whole of work is gonna be decimated. Everything's gonna change. Coding. That's probably true of, it's not necessarily true of like being Prime Minister because there's are sort of fundamentally more complicated skills. it
seem like the PM of Sweden could,
the PM suite maybe could be. Well there's an, one of our mps a Labor MP has created an AI version of himself, which is my favorite mad MP thing through since the Hancock app are already
500 Labor
mp. Why would you get another one? But yeah, so I I think that these are, as I say, come back to the idea that if you treat AI as a tool, you are probably doing all right if you treat it as the mysterious foun of information inside your phone and essentially a miniature godhead that way. Madness lies,
So do I not get to tell you about my new idea for physics? Oh, great. Alright. No, please do, Andy. Thank you. I've, I've always wanted to know. Right now for part three, we're going to come, uh, back to I'd say more traditional media outlets. And there's a, there's a trend which, uh, was featured briefly in the last issue of the magazine. And, um, it's gonna be that of foreign correspondence.
And this is, this is not foreign correspondence who might move to a country immersed themselves in its culture and politics and history and send home fascinating dispatches for readers. This is people who move overseas so they can continue writing columns about Britain based on. Like other British media and it's, it's a rapidly growing area. It's fan, it's fantastic.
Can I put my early bid in for Lionel Shriver? Uh, I live in Portugal because England's so rubbish, but Portugal has its own problems. I can't find cumin at the supermarket, which was such a niche That's, I really enjoyed it. Just all the things.
yes. And a really common thing that a lot of these columnists do as Lionel Shrever did, is to say, oh, I actually moved it. I left the country a couple of years ago, but I have been writing about it since then. Um,
for the second time with Lionel Shriver, I mean, she's American. She lived in London for a great many years. Yes. Uh, and has now moved to Portugal. 'cause she didn't like that either. But she did make the very sensible point in her piece that she wrote for the Times recently. She did say she does know what's going on because she keeps informed. Because I watched Spectator tv, spiked online podcasts and YouTube appearances by Matt Goodwin, David Starkey, and Brenda O'Neill.
Just get out there and you know, you're in Portugal. Go to
beach, Have a pastor Don.
take
the This is the media equivalent of a large number of expats living in Spain for about 30 years and reading the Daily
Yeah.
England's rubbish. Um, which is why I live here,
which is why I voted Brexit. That's my favorite group of people. The expat who voted Brexit. Um,
it's, but
you are quite the connoisseur of these.
I am. not I am. I find it interesting 'cause I think there are, there are a lot of amazing columnists writing in the UK now. There really are. And they, they, they do their own. That's True. I was about to say they do their own research, but that makes it sound like they're watching YouTube videos. And they, but they, they research, they talk to people, they're experts.
They have a, a small, you know, um, allotment of things that they write about, and they, and they write about those really well.
Right. But when we, we rounded these up in the mag last time, I was surprised by how many of these people
are? There are lots. There are lots. Um, so Andrew Neil, if you're listening to this right now, you may be at your home in the south of France. Um,
charming the grass, the perfume capital of province.
Uh, Richard Littlejohn spends a lot of his time writing declining full stuff about the UK from Florida. Uh, there's a, a very energetic pair of columnists, guy Elizabeth Dampier, who write for the Telegraph, uh, from Germany. , So one of guy's recent pieces was all about, um, uh, protests in Epping. Uh, near a migrant hotel. And he wrote, Epping is a charming, close-knit community, not like the largely northern post-industrial towns, which protested last summer after the South Port attack.
It is a leafy area. As said, how do you know you're at somewhere in the Rhineland? You know, it is just Lionel Shriver's article just saying, you know, her, her 'cause it's, it's commonly the thing to, that's, you know, you always need ideas, don't you, when you're a columnist. So that's a column like why I've left Hellhole Britain. That's, that's another week that the wolf is kept away from the door of the cupboard with no ideas in it. Um, but, um, here's Lionel.
Why is the mild-mannered academic? David bets now such a popular guest on British podcasts because bets a professor of war in the modern world assesses the forbiddingly high likelihood. Of a British civil War.
Is he, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I've
heard of him
he's not been on any
David Starkey's YouTube channel? If that's be. I know
there's a really circular element to this where people are taking, as gospel things, they're reading in the comments under other people's articles. So Lionel Schrier writes in the comments under articles like this one, native Britain's owing to Leave in droves. a lot of the time they are, but a lot of these comments may firstly be coming from other people who've left the country already, or not be an entirely representative subset of British opinion.
There just seems to be a, a kind of circular effect, not unlike that of the large language models of people saying, well, it's awful, isn't it? Yes. You know,
and a number of these pieces used as a hook? well, I mean, recent surveys have said that lots and lots of, um, uh, rich people are, are leaving Britain. And then as, as a piece in the eye pointed out, this survey was produced by, by a, um, consultancy, which helps rich people. Um, so it wasn't entirely reliable. Yeah.
Yes. I'm fascinated to know how well, so Isabel Oaks shop has moved to Dubai. I'm really interested to know how well she's integrated into, uh, Dubai Society. We, For example, is she buying large handbags and living in a mall?
Well, we come to the queen of this industry, Isabel Oaks shop, um, who in January this year wrote how I became a Labor School fee exile in Dubai, sick of Labor's private school tax raid. Oak Shop decided to swap the rolling hills of the Cowa for the desert of the UAE. I do think a lot of these columnists, when they leave, they do. Present it as some kind of noble Robin hood style thing they're doing bravely camping out the dictatorship, which won a huge election victory in last year.
Um, like it's not 10 66. You're not hiding in the fence from the Normans
in the for, she's presumably living in a nice high rise service apartment block. She's not in a bedroom tent, is she?
Yeah. Now, to be fair, I, I think we should be fair to, um, to Isabel Oak shot. She wrote a, she wrote a piece earlier this year, which really kicked off saying, look, I don't want to be that person who moves abroad and only moans about Britain. Being permanently on the lookout for mad sad things about our country is bad for the soul and unfair on everyone who is stuck here making the best of it. So that's a, that is a, that's a really self aware point.
I'm just gonna give you a few of her other, uh, recent headlines. Britain is trapped in a dizzying decline, and London is, its epicenter with this caliber of mp. It's no wonder Britain is on the decline. Our once civilized country deserves better than these filthy lawless streets. It's no good telling us there's less crime, the British people know better.
come back to question, which is, how how do you, even asking ask your taxi driver 'cause you are not even in Britain. I just,
just I know. Well, that column ended with these words. Um, it would be easier to stop caring than keep calling it out. That is the attitude of some wealthy people who treat countries like hotels, flitting
from one to another according to cost,
perceived star rating and level of service. How depressing.
correspondence runs.
It's not just what country are you in, it's what planet are you on? I cannot believe this. I'm sorry. I love it. It's the do barometer. I know. I'm sorry to ran. As you guys know, I'm a sunny sort. I like, I'm an optimist. I'm a cheery guy, but it just, I, I can't believe it should be in Dubai. Weather's
lovely.
I noticed that private eye last issue had a, um, a piece by someone called Isabelle Cheap Shot, um, in which he complained about Dubai saying it was full of foreigners and half of them were Muslim and they were Bangladeshi workers
half finished,
finished, um, construction sites. I mean, it sounds awful,
the point we were making with that hack watch piece, this isn't just people going abroad. It genuinely, every single one of them was talking about Tinder Box Britain and how it was on the verge of revolution, which a, you can't know at all. And b, there is a point where that just becomes kind of inciting a situation from abroad.
in my ideal world, it would disqualify you from making any comments on anything going on in Britain at all if you have chosen to move to Dubai or Florida or anything like that. But it certainly does surely stop you to doing big state of the Nation and YOY pieces. He absolutely has to, doesn't it?
I think one of the horrible things about journalists in the internet environment is you have to consciously make. Uncommercial choices to do good work. Right. And hope that in some it pays off in some larger cosmic way or moral way, or maybe the subscription way. I mean, this is, yeah, but this is the subscription model versus the ad funded model, which again, to neatly tie the podcast together, Google's going to solve by depriving anyone of any viral traffic.
So those stories are gonna become pointless to write soon. viral traffic will not, will not exist in any year's time because no one will, there's no point hopping on a trend. It will just, people just read about it in the AI Google AI summary. We are, I think the one thing that we are gonna see is, is it maybe, when is AI Isabel Oak shot exists, will acknowledge that actually air was a good thing after all.
Thank you all for listening to page 94. We'll be back again in a fortnight with another one. If you've enjoyed the show, then why not get a subscription to the magazine? Go to private hyphen i.co.uk. It's really good. It's really good. The cartoons on the, in the magazine itself are way better than the cartoons on the podcast. You know, I are not good.
I've arrested for anything we've said on the podcast yet. Not even us there. Exactly,
exactly. Uh, so private hyen night.co uk. Get your subscription now. Uh, until then, that's all. Enjoy the weather and we'll see you in a fortnight for another one. Thanks to you for listening and thanks as always to Matt Hill of Rethink Cordio for producing. Bye for now. great.
when you said two of us have crossed the Shorts Rubicon, I will not say on, off because it sounded extremely IFF to me.
I'm not gonna say who's wearing shorts. I'm only
say yes, you are.
There are four, there are four knees on display.
And neither of them are what I believe are called short, short, this year's summer fashion. Uh, they're, they're middling.
Yeah. We've not, gone full Paul Mascal have we quite yet? I
mine from the famous five range. Uh,
got
pop to Kean Island after this and bust some smugglers.
I was gonna say
you are actually are doesn't it?
I think we all know. I'm Tim, the dog leave.
Right.