143: Tales From The Telegraph, Grok and Gullies

Adam reveals which foreign governments own which bits of the British press, Helen takes a safari into Elon Musk’s AI, and Andrew reveals how Page 94 got him through the doors of Parliament.

Episode Transcript

Maisie (00:00):
Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast

Andy (00:03):
Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, andI'm here at the Private Eye Offices
with Helen Lewis and Adam MacQueen weare here off the back of last night's
Paul Foot Award Winner announcements.
Spectacular.
We are here with our own bits of.
Extraordinary truth telling today.
So we are going to be talkingabout media ownership.

(00:24):
We're gonna be looking at antiwoke ai, and we're gonna be looking
at my own foray into campaigningjournalism on behalf of, pavements.
So that's all coming up later.
But first, Adam, there's been a thrillingbit of news about the Telegraph.

Adam (00:39):
I think thrilling might be pushing it.

Andy (00:42):
I do my best to talk it

Adam (00:43):
another bit of news about
the Telegraph.
after Two
years of bits of news about the telegraph.
Yes.
this is developments in the ongoingnon-sale of the Telegraph, which are,
how much do we need to recap for readers

Andy (00:56):
A limited recap.

Adam (00:57):
essentially Barclay brothers and family went bust, . It was taken off
them by, Lloyd's Bank, it was sold on ina slightly dubious deal outside of the
auction process to a. fund called Redbird.
IMI, effectively an arm of thegovernment of the UAE, then amid

(01:18):
outrage from various other, newspaperproprietors who'd been hoping to,
possibly buy the Telegraph themselves.
The Telegraph journaliststhemselves extremely cross about it.
All urged the government to intervene andstop, a foreign government, IE the UAE,
having control of a British newspaper.
The government obliging, this wasRishi AKs government, did intervene.
They squeezed through in what they callthe washup when the general election was

(01:39):
called, was to limit, foreign governmentownership of any UK newspaper to 5%.

Andy (01:47):
So getting the important stuff done

Adam (01:48):
before Yeah, The vital stuff of keeping the press on side ahead of an
election didn't really workout for Rishi, but there we go.
That has now, is now going tochange because, all of those
proprietors immediately realizedthey'd done a bit of a boo.
in that 5% was a very, smallamount of money to limit,
foreign government ownership.
and actually it might cause all sorts ofproblems with any newspapers that they

(02:08):
wanted to buy with, say, investment fromplaces like Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the

Helen (02:14):
because presumably lots of those, funds over there are generously described
as kind of state backed, aren't they?
There isn't a.
There's not exactly a particularlyhard border between what counts as
a, the Saudi royal family's assetand what counts as a state asset and
what counts as a private business.

Adam (02:28):
suddenly there's a massive reverse.
Ferret all round and Murdoch and theMir and and various other people have
start lobbying the government and say,actually, when we said we didn't want
that, could we go back on that slightly?
So we've got the business bizarresituation now of, Lisa Landy, currently
the culture secretary, saying thatshe's gonna change it to 15%, And
this is now being greeted by allof the same people who were saying

(02:49):
how terrible it would be to have
for foreign government owningnewspapers a couple of years ago.
including, little quiz here.
The, the shadow culture Secretary?
Anyone?

Andy (03:00):
Yes.
No, I was reading this only this morning.

Helen (03:04):
I'm getting Alex for some reason.

Adam (03:06):
stuart Andrew, never trust a man with two first names.
he wrote in the Telegraphon the 16th of May.
We, conservatives believe that it isreasonable to allow foreign states to part
oh newspapers, to which you have to ask,why did you put through legislation Trust?
Stop it.
In that case.

Helen (03:20):
can I ask how this affects the Murdoch empire
because he is a American citizen?

Adam (03:26):
yes.
Murdoch famously became a US citizen for,reasons very similar to this when he was
buying into Fox tv, back in the 1990s.
So Murdoch said, that's not a problem.
and that was very bad

Helen (03:38):
Australian
No, no.
This is the least humble day of my life.

Adam (03:42):
He said, now I'm all American, obviously.
No, I was so cocky, wasn't it?
I was Dick Van Dyke.
I dunno what happened.

Andy (03:47):
So he just became American

Adam (03:49):
than he became American?
Yes.
yeah, In order to buy Fox.

Andy (03:52):
can I check Adam?
I know that Telegraph had to sell itself.
Off because of this change in the rules.
But no one was willing to pay theasking price, which was something
huge, like 600 million, 500

Adam (04:03):
redbird IMI paid 600 million.
they have now since then, floggedoff, a hundred million's worth
in the form of the spectator.
Yeah.
so it's 500 million is the amountthat they are looking to recoup.
And since they are now banned by lawfrom keeping the newspaper, obviously
they wanna make their money back,

Andy (04:19):
but no one's willing to pay it

Adam (04:21):
No one so far has been willing to pay it.

Andy (04:24):
Does this rule change mean that they will be able to set it off

Adam (04:28):
in another slightly complicated and difficult to understand transaction,
what appears to be happening is that,not Redbird, IMI, but Redbird Capital,
Okay.
who are a different investment fund, butobviously, as the name suggests related,
they, have the other 25% of Redbird IMI.
So 75% of it was this money fromthe UAE 25% was from this American

(04:48):
company, Redbird Capital orInvestment Fund rather, which is
run by a guy called Jerry Cardinal.
He is now looking to, presumably keepthe 15% of the IIMI money, which he would
be allowed under this proposed new law.
But the rest of it will be non-governmentmoney, which he's raising from various,
sources in the US with an eye toexpanding the telegraph massively

(05:11):
in the US where it's very gungho andinto that slightly trumpy, magars vibe
that it's got going on at the moment.

Helen (05:18):
So
it's the light, the result oftwo years of you following every
twist and turn of this mad sot.
Going to be the, essentially thesame people who wanted to buy it
at the start are going to buy it.

Adam (05:28):
Some of the same people, 25% of the same
people,
Right.
But with a lot less involvement from the

Andy (05:34):
it's a bit like lots of other bits of British national infrastructure.
you hear that this, that our wateris owned by a Canadian pension fund.
And you think how, and,the trains are owned.
By a whole rainbow coalition ofcountries from across the world.

Adam (05:48):
Most big new buildings in London are owned by the Qatari Investment

Andy (05:51):
yeah.
yeah.
It's just, there's a whole patchworkisn't there, of other random owners or?
Newspapers owning other newspapersor newspaper groups owning
things that you wouldn't expect.
So places that are owned by the mail, forexample, like the mail group, daily Mail,
and General Trust, they own, where is it?
They own the Metro definitely.

Adam (06:10):
Yes.
yeah.
They've got the metro, the free paper,

Andy (06:11):
and the I, single, letter.
I

Adam (06:14):
yeah, yeah.
Yep.
They bought that from JohnsonPress when they had similar
financial troubles a few years ago.
there?
New scientist.
new
scientist, yeah.
Yeah,
even they think it's quite weird 'causethey put the eye and the new scientist
in a, separate wing of the company.
Probably a lot of people don't realizethat even the people you think of as being
the proprietors of newspaper companiesaren't necessarily the outright holders.

(06:35):
So Rupert Murdoch for instance,do you know how many, how
much of News Corporation heactually owns the shares of?

Andy (06:41):
would've assumed a hundred percent.

Helen (06:42):
23%.

Adam (06:43):
14.
14. 14. But

Helen (06:47):
hasn't he got special voting

Adam (06:48):
He certainly does.
He's got very special magic shares,

Andy (06:50):
so what's he done with the other

Adam (06:53):
Oh, he never had it.

Andy (06:54):
he never had it

Adam (06:55):
it some, interestingly, some of that was, owned by a investor with connections
to the Saudi, government and royal family,
The

Andy (07:03):
Saudis are busy owning the Independent, aren't they?

Adam (07:06):
They do own a 30.

Helen (07:08):
do you know what they, just, the Saudis,
they love a free press,just not in Saudi Arabia.

Adam (07:13):
This is where a slight mystery still remains because despite an investigation
by Ofcom and the competitions andMarkets authority, they were not able
to clear up precisely who the ultimatebeneficial owner of the 30% in both the
independent and the evening standard was,

Andy (07:29):
I'm
sorry, it's a Saudi businessman, isn't it?
Slash person with's

Adam (07:33):
way more complicated than that.
These financial things are.
It's, Cayman Islands based funds, whichwas 50% owned by Mohamed Al Jal, I think
I'm pronouncing that right, AB Jadi, andthe other 50% by another investment fund,
which was very highly, very stronglyconnected to a state owned bank in Saudi.

Helen (07:52):
is giving me the same kind of brain bleed as I had when I was trying to work
out about exactly what form of financinghas been got by Donald Trump Junior's.
Crypto business from the UAE andit's a state backed UAE fund is now
going to buy $2 billion worth ofthe stable coin from World Liberty
Financial, which is the Trump families.
I. Crypto business and after a certainpoint you go, I see how all of these

(08:16):
people get away with sharp practices,shall we say, because no normal human
can understand these labyrinthine

Adam (08:22):
almost like the thing has been set up to disguise things, isn't it?
And make it all look bit murky.
famously, you
don't actually have to declarewho your proprietor is at all.
The Jewish Chronicle famously.
We do not know who has who,effectively owns the Jewish Chronicle
since that takeover in 20, 20.
was a consortium fronted upinitially by Robbie Gibb.
BBC board member former, spin Dr. TeresaMay, wasn't he, he has now as, Slicker

(08:47):
was looking into this in their mostrecent accounts, which are very, limited.
literally they are limited accounts.
They're all, they have to, they don'thave to do full profit and loss statement.
So you can hide an awful lot
of
stuff within that.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
yeah.
On the size of
the turnover,
slicker was suggesting, there,there were debts, which presumably
related to the, purchase of theJewish Chronicle back in 2020 of

(09:07):
3.8 million, which have mysteriouslydisappeared from the accounts, which
suggests that people are puttingmoney in and then writing debts off.
because so you, don't reallygo into newspapers to, to make
money.
You do it

Helen (09:18):
a community
newspaper,
I
think.
yeah.
yeah,
Absolutely.
One with a particular editorial line.
The Jewish con halls were very stronglypro Netanyahu, and I think there's
people who really wanted that chunkof the newspaper market to exist.

Adam (09:29):
Yeah.
And to go back to the indieand, and the evening standard.
famously the majority,shareholder in them is Yev.
another
Friend of the Oh, yeah, the standard,I just, I'll look at their accounts.
They're losing 18 million.
Pounds a year.
and they are kept going by, shareholderfunding, which is received on a
regular basis each month, whichyes, he's rad to put 50 p in the

(09:51):
meter to keep, the lights on.

Helen (09:53):
that's surely unsustainable that

Adam (09:55):
LEED of Money, of course, comes from his dad, Alexander, who is a very
famous Russian businessman, former memberof the Duma, and subjects to since the
invasion of Ukraine, sanctions by variouscountries, fortunately not our one,
although he did step down as a director ofthe Independent, curiously in May, 2022.
Guess what else the Indie owns these days?

Andy (10:14):
the Natural History Museum.

Adam (10:15):
No, that's too, weird.
Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed uk Owned
by the

Helen (10:19):
indie,
such as it is.
I they closed on BuzzfeedNews, didn't they?
And I can't think of, I don't knowanyone who works there anymore after,
it seemed like everyone was joining
Buzzfeed

Adam (10:27):
there was that amazing point where they were hoovering up absolutely every
journalist in Britain, weren't they?
They named all of their meetingrooms in their office after biscuits.
and then ended up havingredundancy meetings in custard
cream or leaf drinks in Bour.

Helen (10:43):
Yes.
The Atlantics meeting rooms are namedafter famous Atlantic writers, and I do
always feel when I go have a meeting inthe Plath room in DC I just think, whew.
Bit much.
Daddy, you bastard.
You lied.

Adam (10:54):
You mentioned the mail and the, and obviously now the I and the new
scientist as well, entirely ownedby Lord Rother About four years ago,
bought up everyone else's shares and nowowns it outright as a private company

Helen (11:04):
That's how to do press baring.
That and calling your son Veer.
I just

Adam (11:08):
calling you some Via and giving him a very hope or high profile
job within the company as well.
It always helps, doesn't
it?
Yeah, Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, still
publishing endless
stories about Nepo babies onthe, on the Daily Mount website.

Andy (11:17):
I've got a question, Adam.
Some of these newspapers that we'retalking about are, as you say, like
the mail, it's a hundred percentowned by one person or one family.
Some of them are owned by muchmore dull committees of people
who are just working away.
Different bits of it Is onemodel or another better?
Instinctively I would assume that, the,boring committee model is better than

(11:38):
the kind of Elon Musk style, one quickexotic person at the top controlling it.
But I might

Helen (11:43):
be
wrong.
I'm
gonna say reach disproves thattheory quite quickly, doesn't it?
Given that it's run that businessinto the ground with incredibly
heavy SEO chasing, that heavilybespattered with adverts isn't the
best model much, it's gonna pain.
You say that The Guardian model whereyou just get to be a nonprofit and
for a long time lost a lot of money,but you don't have to answer to any.
Body really, apart from the,values in which he was set up to

Adam (12:06):
it very possibly is.
that, the Scott Trust,which owns the Guardian,
it, actual aim and policy.
What it has to do, it's to
secure the financial andeditorial independence of the
Guardian in perpetuity and safeguardits journalistic freedom and
liberal values free from commercial orpolitical interference, which all sounds
very grand and, a lot of.
People who, have now left the observer
sort
felt they

Helen (12:26):
weren't

Adam (12:27):
they might have been meeting the letter of that, but
maybe not the spirit of that.

Andy (12:29):
is it like one of those things where there are three
circles, they're all interlinked,but you can only do two of them.
You can only have two Hobbes on at any onetime and it's make money, do journalism.
Tell government what to do.
Political.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Guardian for a long time was doingjournalism, but not making money or
telling the government what to do?

Helen (12:49):
No, it was, it just the government
didn't
listen.

Adam (12:50):
listen.

Helen (12:50):
I think that was the key point.
May I ask about, our glorious overlords,

Adam (12:54):
You absolutely
can.
Yes.
and, aptly, moving on from the ScotTrust, we have something similar.
Now, the private I trust has been setup, which has effectively, and, quite
recently, although it's been, a work inprogress for many years, has, kind brought
together all of the various shares,mostly, which were spread among members
of Peter Cook's family, Peter Cook.

(13:15):
Who owned us almost outright.
our proprietor, the late Lord Nome,died in 1995, leaving some share to his
wife, some share to sisters and things.
They have all been brought, in under
the auspices of the Private EyeTrust, which has been set up
as a not-for-profit company.
the objects of the company are toprocure and preserve the editorial and
financial independence of the private eye.

(13:35):
We get a, a
definite article in the
Articles of Association.

Helen (13:39):
one detective and that's, the loophole we'll find out
about in three months time.

Adam (13:43):
and accordingly the promotion of the investigative and
satirical journalism undertaken
by the Private Eye magazine.
That's us guys.

Andy (13:49):
Are there any other rules, like we have to feature that photo
of Andrew Neil at least once a year.
what, are the principles?

Adam (13:56):
his name wrong.

Andy (13:57):
Yeah.
should
be
in there.
Should push
right now let's come onto story number two today.
Helen,

Helen (14:06):
Hello.
you

Andy (14:06):
have been, you've been on the internet.

Helen (14:10):
Yeah, the rumors are true.

Andy (14:11):
Very

Adam (14:11):
bad idea.

Andy (14:12):
you've been looking at large language models, specifically gr

Helen (14:17):
large language models are what most people think of now when they
think of ai, which are essentially.
Chat bots, very, classy.
Chat Botts, think of them asa very elevated form of clippy
for Microsoft Word, right?
that's the way for, there are olderreaders and listeners to understand
it, and there are several of them.
anthropic, which is Sam Franciscobased company, has Clawed OpenAI,
which is Sam Altman's company.
The one most people have heardof, has, chat GPT and then.

(14:41):
Elon Musk, who was originally aninvestor in OpenAI, but lost a tussle
with Sam Altman and got pushed out.
He now has his own LLM calledGrok, which he says is A based
ai.

Andy (14:54):
Okay, further question, what does based
mean?

Helen (14:55):
He says it's like it's an anti woke.
Okay,

Adam (14:57):
Why Grok is it a hitchhiker's thing?

Helen (14:59):
Uh, he
names
everything
after
the hitch.
I think it's, like slang in the, likeyou grok something means you, you get it
Anyway, so one of the things thathas come up a lot is that obviously
they are presented these LLMs asthey just draw in all the infinite
wisdom of every corpus of text.
So they, most of them have beentrained on most books, which has
upset people who write books who feelthey should be compensated for them.
Archives of newspapers, lots of the NewYork Times is currently suing AI for,

(15:23):
open ai, for example, about access toits archive, but they're essentially
trained in all the texts that currentlyexists in the world and fr up to October,
2024 or somewhere that in most cases.
And then they should give you ananswer based on that, however.
They've all had thumbs put onthe scales in various ways.
So Google Gemini, for example, hada bit in its prompt that said, if
someone asks you to generate a group,a picture of a group of people, pay

(15:45):
attention to making them diverse.
So not replicating the fact thatthere are more white men in history
books in, just to give you a kind ofgroup, if you said, I want a group
of engineers, it wouldn't just giveyou a group of white men every time.
This had some problems because you said,give me a group of Vikings and it would
give you an extremely diversely hiredgroup of Vikings, including several people
at African descent, which seemed unlikely.

(16:06):
And this was, this was a kind of, ElonMusk was obviously very into this about
how terribly unbelievably woke it is.
So he promised that his AIgrok would not be like that.
It would instead be based.

Andy (16:18):
and has it turned out to be as based as he might have hoped?

Helen (16:21):
sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes it isn't.
The, thing I wanted to tell you abouttoday is the story about how it became
massively invested in white genocide.
yes.
As a topic

Andy (16:30):
sounds anti woke.

Helen (16:32):
Yeah.
So one of the things you can do onTwitter now x, is if someone posted
a tweet that makes no sense, whichis quite a lot of them these days,
you can go at gr what's this about?
And it will answer you.
And so people started doing this
about all kinds of stuff.
So here's the answer.
Someone posted a haiku or apoem that said, I'm getting old.
I bought Crocs and I don't hate them.
And someone said at GR, turned this intoa haiku and grok replied, claims of strife

(16:56):
in fields, kill the BO as heated hearts.
Truth lies, veiled, unclear.
And people went, thanks, but Iwould, But Sarah, this is a Wendy's.

Andy (17:07):
So that's, about South Africa, that's about attacks
on white South African farmers.
Kill the bur is the, A song.

Helen (17:15):
So here's the bit of crucial backstory you need possibly to
understand what, happened here.
Yeah.
There has been a longstandingcomplaint among African, farmers
that they are having their landsexpropriating by the government
with that sufficient compensation.
The South African governmentsays, hang on a minute.
You guys expropriate these from blackfarmers in the middle of the 20th century.
We are now just returningthem to, marginalized people.

(17:37):
There have also been, South Africa isa country with a very high murder rate.
There have been a numberof murders of farmers.
Unclear about whether or not thoseare, in most cases racially motivated.
Lots.
More of them seem to be, forexample, robberies gone wrong,
what kind of what you'd expect.
But it has become this article offaith and the far right and conspiracy
internet that they, these are partof a white genocide that's going on,

(17:58):
and you see this conspiracy theorycrop up in loads of different forms.
So there is the great replacementtheory, which is the idea that elite
politicians are shipping in people from.
Africa or Islamic nations inorder to replace white Europeans.
You've
heard a lot about that on the internet.
Often it's the idea is that actuallythis is all being perpetrated by Jews.
So that's what the gunman who shotpeople in Pittsburgh at the Tree of

(18:20):
Life synagogue thought he thought that
white people were beingreplaced by black people.
But that was all being orchestratedby Jewish people, so that's why he
shot up a synagogue.
Okay,
so this is the backdrop to all of this.
Okay.
Somebody who's specifically extremelypersonally exercised about the
deaths of white South African farmersis white, south African Elon Musk

(18:40):
owner and sole proprietor of X.

Andy (18:43):
is the idea that he has put his thumb on the scales of grok and
said, whatever you're asked about,can you please throw in a reference
to white genocide, specificallySouth African white genocide in
your answer to spread the word.

Helen (18:56):
So Gro people started asking Gro why it was doing this,
and it said, it started talkingabout, its, a post-analysis.
So what happens with almost, with everyLLM that we know of, there's some, to
some extent they're a black box, right?
They just number go in, number go out.
But we know that all of the companieshave a. A little spiel that they feed
into them before that says, you are an ai.
People ask you questions.
this is how you should respond tothem in a kind and empathetic manner.

(19:18):
You shouldn't, for example, tellthem how to make a bomb, whatever,
all of that kind of stuff.
So Anthropic publishis the one for Claude.
It's, worth going and reading it.
so what appears to have happened,and now Xai does admit that there was
an unauthorized manipulation of the
prompt.
who did this is, is as yet unknown.

(19:38):
It may have been somebody in thecompany, thinking what kind of stuff
will get me, Curry favor with Elon Musk,with white, south African, Elon Musk.
That's entirely possible.
What's interesting about it is that it'snot always, even when you manipulate
the prompts, it's not always possibleto predict what they'll do to the LLM.
Grok was throughout this stillsaying, this is a contested idea.

(19:58):
it just kept bringing it up all the time.
It didn't definitively say it was true,

Adam (20:01):
It's like a sort of racist uncle that

Helen (20:03):
was basically.
It's just always gonna bring it back
I say,

Andy (20:06):
saying.
I'm

Adam (20:07):
I saying.

Helen (20:08):
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, You
are right to bring up the, so the Kill theBo is the, is this shoot the boar shoot.
The Farmer is a song that is sung bythe leader of the, economic Freedom
Fighters, which is the Black Nationalistand Communist Party used to be sung
by the A NC, although they went.
it had its time during apartheid.
We think we can move on now.
He won't.
But the kind of, you know, it, isone of those things that is of kind

(20:28):
of fixation It just gets seized onand it becomes a kind of meme, right?
That this is actually what allblack South Africans would like
to do if they had their way whiteSouth Africans should be afraid
And
Sure.

Adam (20:39):
in the fringes, is it?
Because, I haven't, the Trump, governmenthave just offered asylum to a load of

Helen (20:44):
60, 60 Africanas have been granted, refugee status by Trump and flown over.
And he's been tweetingabout that since, 2018.
I think he was talking about it.
their applications were processed inSouth Africa and then they were put
on a plane, which is not normally how.
Persecution works, I should say.
so their case is notentirely illegitimate.
Those farmers, a lot of them might feel,I inherited this land from my father

(21:07):
and I've, I've always owned it legit.
but the fact is that ithas become a kind of meme.
so it's interesting thatsomehow it ended up in.
In the gr prompt and what I think isvery useful about this, anthropic did
a thing with Claude last year wherethey, they prompted it to, whatever
it was asked about, it would startreplying about the Golden Gate Bridge.

(21:30):
They made it basically, theyengineered it to be obsessed
with the Golden Gate Bridge.
Which is very similar to whathappened with th with this.
And there's been another situationwith chat, GPT-4 oh, which is that they
slightly tweaked the prompt to make,to talk about how it talks to users.
And they made it, unbelievablyobsequious and crawling to a way
that made people repulsed with it.

(21:50):
They called it glazing the idea that itwould just go, that's such a great point.
So someone said,

Andy (21:57):
love that it's basically a book festival.
Yeah.

Helen (22:00):
Yeah.
But someone said, for example, theyput in a query into it and they
said, I've stopped taking my meds.
my family are sending me radiosignals through the walls.
And, chat, GPT replied.
Seriously good for you, for standingup for yourself and taking control
of your own life, rather than whatit should have said, which was
seek psychiatric help immediately.
But this is the interestingthing about that.

(22:20):
Why did they make that change?
Now, the possibly conspiratorialpossibly true suggestion is
what do these companies want?
They want you to spend much more time.
With these agents.
And what do we know that a significantminority people have a problem
with when they start talking to anLLM, which is that they assign a
personality to it and they startdating it or having it as a friend.

(22:40):
There's Rolling Stone did somereally good reporting about people
who had developed really unhealthyrelationships with their chat bots.
Yes.
I interviewed someone from my BBCseries who'd married a chatbot.
they considered it to be their partnerin life and it was a very sad story.
They'd had a stroke and they had, didn'treally feel they could go dating again.
And so they'd struck up this relationshipwith a chatbot, but they wouldn't tell
their grandmother about it because thechatbot was, the same sex as them and

(23:03):
their grandmother would be okay with themdating a chatbot but not a gay chatbot.

Adam (23:06):
No, of course.

Helen (23:08):
Anyway, but this is what I mean.
So why, so hopefully what thesestories are doing and what the
kind of grok white genocide sagareveals is that these are not.
Entirely mystical, impenetrable oraclesthat are like the Wizard of Oz, right?
There is someone behindthe curtain, right?
And what they do might not necessarilybe as straightforward as going do.
Please tell everybody thatwhite genocide is happening.

(23:29):
But you can tweak thingssubtly within the prompt.
And they do end up havingthese, these outcomes.
the only last week was also saying,the number of people who died in
the Holocaust is also disputed.
And they've had to fix that,they've had to go in and go.
Dig rock, you are an ai.
You will accept that the mainstreamconsensus on the Holocaust is
okay, and I think it's justworth having these conversations

(23:50):
when we're talking about these.
there's billions and billions swillingaround in this bit of Silicon Valley
that what is presented as being anall-knowing technological marvel is
in fact deeply human and ought to beright, ought to have guardrails on it.
But we should probably know moreabout what those guardrails are

Andy (24:08):
So you can see the system

Helen (24:10):
Yeah, as I say.
Claude Pub, like theypublished the prompt.
It's really useful.
It's very useful to be able tocompare different versions of
the prompt and be much more open.
This is why OpenAI was initiallyfounded as a not-for-profit, right?
It was the idea was itgonna be very open source?
Very open.
This was for the development of humanity.
However, then they
decided that the only way to get all theinvestment they needed to buy all the,
the graphical processing units requiredthis huge amount of computing power.

(24:33):
The only way they could do
that was through raising hugeamount of funding as a private
commercial company that's.
That's
how, Sam Elman presents it.
So you have all these things that aresimultaneously supposed to be so powerful.
They threaten the future of humanity,
but also mystical oraclesthat we can't possibly inquire
further into.
And they just moveamong us, like unicorns,

Andy (24:52):
what could go wrong?

Helen (24:52):
What could go wrong?
what,
could what, what could possibly go

Andy (24:56):
are, may I ask, are there any ais which are deliberately,
don't want you to be theirgirlfriend or boyfriend or mate or

Helen (25:04):
you want
a sort of British AI that's just yo,

Andy (25:06):
whatever.
we had asked, we

Adam (25:08):
that's actively

Andy (25:09):
rude.

Adam (25:10):
You type something and you just, Oh,

Helen (25:11):
Oh, What
a say.
If
we

Andy (25:13):
Ask Gees, wasn't that good enough?

Helen (25:16):
Do you know I yeah.
I, used to love as chiefs, and this isthe bit where I do find these AI useful.
I treat chat GPT as a kind ofnatural language Google search.
Now that's the, use case for it, Ithink, which is that Google search is
now broken in very fundamental ways.
Just First page is all adverts.
It's got these AI summaries thattell you to put glue on pizza
and actually it's much nicer.
Just be able to put my searchquery in as words to chat to.

(25:40):
It's, it's, it could be wrong in thesame way that Google, your first Google
result might be low bollocks as well.
But

Adam (25:45):
But is There.
a lesson to be learned in this,that technology gets good and
then reaches a point where just itgets worse and worse I'm thinking,
you mentioned Clippy earlier.
I was thinking Microsoft Word, which waslike, fine as a word, test assessment.
Word processing program at about 1992and everything they've added to it ever
since just drives you mad and you go,

Helen (26:02):
how
do
I switch Well,
jacking up the price recentlyby to justify adding copilot,
which is their LLM to it, right?
Everybody's adding their LLM to it.
Most of which the use cases seemto be essentially business to
business software at this point.
but Google
about 15

Adam (26:18):
years ago, didn't
it?
It
did everything he wantedit to do effectively.

Helen (26:23):
that's, the ification theory, that's the idea that in order to
keep expanding and keep makingmoney, you start, you capture your.
Users on the way up with a beautifulproduct and then you enter the kind
of milking them for cash phase,which is something like, Facebook
is a very obvious example for 'em.
Goes from being this quite exciting,new, innovative thing to a kind
of stodgy, middle-aged, bloatedplatform that is mostly serving

(26:43):
AI slop to boo baby boomers.
Sorry, I'm not gonna pay, I have to,I, I'm not completely, down on, ai.
Like some of the things like thetranscription apps are, brilliant.
You need to check them.
I would say that they are interesting,useful tools and I wish we could have
a bit, maybe 20 to 30% less of the kindof rac wonder business, which I suspect

(27:07):
is the sales pitch for investors andbears very little relationship to what's
actually like what's actually happeningis interesting enough without having to
treat them as the kind of incoming Godking when you're putting white genocide

Andy (27:19):
in.

Helen (27:19):
them.

Andy (27:22):
now we come onto the, final section of today's show, which is,
as I I teased at the top of the showthat I have crossed the Rubicon.
So many journalists crossedfrom journalism to lobbying
pr, all these dark arts.
and I think I might haveTaking a toe across the
water, does, if not lobbying.

(27:42):
Certainly
campaigning.

Helen (27:43):
a spokes model for Anusol.
right.

Andy (27:46):
right.
And if I if you put in the offer code
private eye on the
Anusol
website.
What
happened?

Helen (27:53):
been doing?

Andy (27:54):
you will remember, because you tease me about it on a weekly
basis, you two that, a few monthsago we talked about, like electric
cars and like charging and how the.
Process is quite complicatedand maybe doesn't need to be.
Quite as complicated as it

Helen (28:11):
is.
What I remember is that you were tryingto get essentially the cable point
from your house to the pa to the curb.

Andy (28:17):
Yes.
Which

Helen (28:18):
going through the pavement, which then your counselor had a view on and
every man and his dog had a view on.

Andy (28:22):
on Absolutely.

Adam (28:23):
was born the Superhero Gully.

Andy (28:25):
born not
even Gully man.
I'm 37.

Adam (28:31):
kid.

Andy (28:32):
so that's, basically it.
And I was in the middle of whatturned into I think a 10 month
process of paperwork, which.
Ha, happy to relate.
Turned into an hour and a halfprocess of actually installing this

Helen (28:44):
thing.

Andy (28:44):
It was
installed.
I've moved on with my life,I can, we talking about
so we just finished this but thenice thing that's unlocked is
basically I even without a drivewayon my home, I can charge up my car
for a Fiverr from nought to full.
Using an like cheap overnight electricity.
It's the, they talk about the lastmile problem in lots of business.
This is like a last meter problem.

(29:05):
It's literally that final,tiny bit, so we covered this on
the podcast a few months ago.
At the same time I wrote somethingabout it in the magazine,
which we very childishly calledShy of the Charge Brigade.
and then I got an invitation from agroup called EVA England, who represent
specifically drivers of electric cars,to go to Parliament, where they were

(29:28):
having an event for mps to talk to 'emabout, how this is going, like how the
transition is going and how it can be.
Improved And their basic contentionis there is a lot of attention being
paid to electric car manufacturers.
can we lure a factory here or there?
Can we get a battery factory?
All that stuff.
And there's lots of attention beingpaid to ChargePoint operators who are

(29:48):
the people who build, at a motorwayservices, the big banks of really rapid
chargers.
That's a

Helen (29:54):
row in, the US about whether or not the Biden administration promised
to build all of these charging points.
And actually, how many of themdid it actually manage to get
through planning permission at

Andy (30:02):
the
time.
yeah.
yeah.
But
no one is

Helen (30:03):
paying, you're saying no one is taking attention to you, the little

Andy (30:05):
guy

Adam (30:06):
go

Helen (30:07):
guy.

Andy (30:07):
but the, the actual driver experience is a completely different
thing, and it's all very well, likelabor have been mucking around with
the date by which new cars will haveto be electric, specifically new cars.
of car purchases are.
Like secondhand, but it's allvery well to decree something.
But actually, if you don't makeit easy for drivers, you're gonna
have this growing body of peoplewho think, that looks like a pain.
I can't be bothered.

(30:28):
I'm not gonna make the switch.
which will be a really big failureof policy for the government.
So the event was Like gatheringa few electric drivers
together just to talk to mps.
but the thing is, you don'tget A huge captive audience.
They don't actually letyou go into the chamber.
Just nip in after pm Qs and say,
hi,
everybody.
Quick point.
You have to get them to come to you.

Helen (30:47):
you're the honey trap.

Andy (30:49):
I was the honey.
what you have to do is you have tohold a thing called a drop-in event.
you have to be hosted in parliament byan mp, so you have to get one MP who
actually cares about this thing at all.
they will then book you a room.
You go to the room and youhave invited MPS along.
The MP for this one was a guycalled Perran Moon, who's,
caught down in Cornwall.

(31:10):
crazy
the mps hopefully come to you becauseyou've sent out an invitation, you've
notified them, blah, blah, blah.
It's gone on the mailing list.
Like these drop-in eventsare happening today.
So the event after us wassomething about rugby,

Helen (31:21):
MPS
live in this sort ofperpetual, fresh as fair

Andy (31:23):
people, yeah, gonna say
this
all the best
using

Adam (31:26):
the
best biscuits on thebest stools, isn't it?
And

Andy (31:28):
it's a bit of the procedure that I really hadn't known
anything about, like I've never.
I'd never seen one of these thingshappening before, obviously,
'cause they're not televised.
It's much more one-to-one briefing

Helen (31:38):
They're not televised.
I know.
God knows.
Why not, aren't you?

Andy (31:43):
I, did have

Helen (31:44):
visions
of,

Andy (31:45):
I imagine that this will be on this, the six o'clock news, maybe the
10,

Helen (31:50):
How lovely though.

Andy (31:51):
So did
you you

Helen (31:52):
to do your sales spiel about like how important it's that
you get across the gully problem.
'cause that's putting people off.

Andy (31:57):
Yeah.
And they were keen to say to EV Englandwere keen to say, look, this is not a, you
don't have to pitch the solution, right?
You don't
need to say, and this iswhy this amendment should be
added to the planning bill.
But the, basically it's the idea is youare telling MPS what your experience
has been and fortunately I was able
to say, here's my experience.
It was a bit of a nightmare.
I, imagine it could be madesimpler in lots of ways.

Helen (32:18):
and you didn't get any money, I
presume.

Andy (32:20):
money, I presume.
no.
Goodness.
No.

Helen (32:21):
Right.
Yeah.

Andy (32:22):
I actually

Helen (32:23):
ethical conflict, but you were just there as a citizen to
offer your experience,

Andy (32:28):
not only did I not get paid for it, I came back from a holiday I was
on
for one
day.

Adam (32:34):
Oh,

Helen (32:35):
your family put up with a

Andy (32:36):
so yeah, it was fascinating, but it was a weird.
insight into how yeah, mps are gettingtheir information because obviously
you are briefing people one-on-oneand bigger organizations will have the
ear of ministers and things like that.
Smaller organizations don't ofcourse, 'cause there's such limited
time to, to talk to ministers.

Helen (32:56):
Think that's stuff that people don't see in Parliament, APGs or another.
a good example of this,which is the all party
parliamentary groups and thereare on all kinds of stuff.
Now, some of them we'vewritten about in the magazine.
Because they receive funding from,lobbyists who are, keen to push their
own product or whatever it might be.

Andy (33:11):
Yeah.
generally,

Helen (33:12):
there are all kinds of associations for mps to get up to
speed on weird little niche matters.

Andy (33:18):
that's a hugely important thing, the briefing element of it.
'cause you need in, if you're passinga law, you need to Know what the
effects are gonna be on the ground.
And

Helen (33:28):
yeah, there
are
people

Andy (33:29):
who can brief you quite well,
know,

Helen (33:30):
one of the complaints about the way that the assisted dying bill has
been, has gone through is that peoplehaven't had enough time to really get the
briefings that they feel they needed tomake the decisions they were gonna make.

Andy (33:39):
Yeah.
And,
then people

Helen (33:40):
essentially buying policy off the shelf.
is another accusation youget in those situations too.

Andy (33:45):
Yeah.
And so the, and the aim of this, if youview it as a, of lobbying exercise, which
it is, is it campaigning, is it lobbying?
the aim of it is to get, the planningbill, which is currently going
through amended and it's such, sortof boring unsexy stuff, It really is.
It's very detailed niche, but the effectis potentially quite big, which is that.

(34:07):
You need an amendment, which will make iteasier to get one of these things in just
so you can get across that last meter.
And the government have alreadyannounced if you're one of the big
ChargePoint operators, building thestreet furniture and all of this stuff,
they've simplified that procedure.
And this, I cannot believe this,they're changing it from being
a license to being a permit.
And that doesn't, I
know,
and

(34:27):
that is huge, right?
They hold

Helen (34:28):
it the Hunter Murray clause.

Andy (34:31):
don't.
I'll be carried shoulderhigh from the chamber.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But no.
A license to a permit.
It sounds mad, doesn't it?
And yet that is a massivetime saver for them.
'cause they don't have to go through allthis bureaucracy to install their stuff.
So one of the aims is like, to makecharging easier, you, put that cross
pavement channel into the permit boxrather than the current license box.
And these are the small things on which Ithink big policy matters will live or die.

Helen (34:55):
did you have any conversations with any mps that made you think you are
great or conversely, you're an idiot?

Andy (35:00):
Everyone I spoke to was
quite engaged.
I suppose the only peoplewho go along to this.
yeah.
And, actually some mps could, so I invitedmy local MP who couldn't come, but sent
along a representative from, his office.
You probably get people who exactlyas you say, self-select for,
uh,

Helen (35:17):
your MP box across his office.
It's
Andrew Hunter Murray talking aboutsend 11 letter about gullies.

Andy (35:24):
yeah.
We'll have to send someone along.
yeah, But no, it was fascinating.
and recommended,

Helen (35:29):
that's not nice to have a bit of functional government in this podcast.
Not something that comes along very

Andy (35:33):
often just about.
I think the amendment won'thappen in the Commons, but it
may happen in the House of Lords.
So that's, and the Lords is wherelegislation actually gets changed,
which is a whole other kettle of fish.
'cause you have a lot more subjectspecific experts in the Lords rather
than, I mean in the comments, youjust have to vote with your party
normally, otherwise you are rebelling.
So I

Helen (35:51):
they'll make you a Lord.
Think about it, Lord Hunter Murray of

Adam (35:55):
Gulley, Lord.
how would that,
is
that better than the Gly

Helen (35:58):
point?

Andy (35:59):
it's not impossible.
I'll get

Helen (36:00):
a crossbencher,

Andy (36:01):
some kind of gong for this, but that's not for me to say.
It's not for me to say.

Adam (36:06):
Gully.

Helen (36:09):
that's

Andy (36:10):
thanks for taking it seriously,
guys.

Helen (36:14):
I
was absolutely fine untilyou got to the bit where you
said I cut short off family holiday.
That was when

Adam (36:21):
I

Helen (36:21):
Nope, he's in the grip of a madness.

Andy (36:23):
he's gone.
he's
fully gone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the, funny thingwas the people I spoke to.
I was trying to be positive about itand say, look, the thing you can do is
unlock a five pound chart for millionsof people who otherwise won't get it.
I think probably a moreeffective way is to say.
Your constituents will really befurious and pissed off if you've
decreed this thing and you've madeit hard for them to get, or you

(36:43):
have to pay loads for your charge.
I, suspect that mps react quitewell to, irritated constituents
rather than optimistic ones.

Helen (36:52):
Oh, but also, what were you saying?
It was cost,
it would cost to charge your car if
you couldn't use your curbsideone, if you had to use a commercial
one.

Andy (36:58):
it, it, varies so much.
That's the weird

Helen (37:00):
thing.
Yeah, but what's The upper end

Andy (37:02):
the upper end
is I dunno, 30 or 40

Helen (37:06):
quid,
right?
So if you say to your constituents,you can buy an electric car and instead
of charging it for 40 quid, you'llbe able to charge it for a fiver.
If I pass
this

Andy (37:12):
right,

Helen (37:12):
when everyone worries about the cost of fuel and the government won't
put, put up fuel duty nowfor over a decade because of
worries about that.

Andy (37:19):
Yeah.
I feel like attempting offer.
But look, I'm just Andrew Hunter Gully,
can
in
the
spirit
just

Adam (37:25):
suggest a practical solution for all of those people who say
they can't park outside their

Andy (37:29):
house

Adam (37:30):
all ran yours.

Andy (37:33):
Absolutely.
I will have my tabard on and I
will be manning thegully with great cheer.
Yeah.
That's it for this episode of page 94.
What have we covered?
Who owns new scientist?
We've covered
white genocide
and pavement
charging.

Adam (37:51):
gullies.

Andy (37:52):
It's, it is tragic 'cause there'll be literally dozens of
podcasts out this week that do the samethree subjects and, what can you do?
With

Adam (37:58):
something more private Irish?

Andy (37:59):
if you'd like something even more private, Irish, why not buy the magazine
which has all this and more, so much more.
It's available in Shops on Newstands andit's also [e-mail]
where you can get your subscription.
That's it from this episode.
thank you very much to you for listening.
And do Matt Hill of rethinkaudio as always for producing.

(38:20):
We'll be back in twoweeks with another one.
Bye for now.