OPINION: There’s been a distinct change of pigment in favour of pink in the editorial echelons of the Irish Times, ever since the paper had to admit it had been hoaxed into publishing an article about fake tan.
It was, admittedly, one of those eye-roller think pieces to which readers flock to be agreeably annoyed: a treatise on how Irish women’s fondness for fake tanning was a troublesome cultural appropriation from people of colour. Colonialisation by melanin, no less.
A mischievous reader, posing as an immigrant and supplying plausible research sources, had generated the article using artificial intelligence – either for the craic, or to test the paper’s wokeness threshold. Before appalled readers could lob the obvious ripostes – what about all these oppressive non-Celtic people who dye their hair red? – the hoax was rumbled. Everyone felt a bit silly, and parents who despair of their young teens’ regular chemical drenching were deprived of a promising argument against.
But is it really necessary to use AI to conjure and fake the most absurd, unnecessary or contrary scenarios when actual humans do it so well?
For instance, it has recently been alleged ‒ in a genuine scholarly paper from the University of Manchester – that the latest James Bond movies have “down-classed” Agent 007 from posh to, shudder, middle-class.
He now not only chugs beer from a bottle and wears branded sportswear, but also has driven a Ford Mondeo. No chatbot could have improved on this, except by adding a Baby on Board sticker to the Mondeo and styling 007 as “Jimbo”.
Nor could AI trolling generate more random improbability than putting Martha Stewart, 81, on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Fair play, the home-making mogul really rather rocks her swimwear, but this is reductio ad absurdum bingo without recourse to AI. Is this further evil dominance by boomers, and what else will they demand? Gigs as Melbourne Cup jockeys or test pilots?
Judi Dench and Bill Nighy have long seemed marvellous old sweeties, but what if they’re just the advance guard for a revolution? What if all the nanas and gramps start self-identifying as 20-somethings and demanding lead roles in romcoms and recording deals? And if your great-grandma and grandpop haven’t got their modelling contracts yet, does this show a lack of commitment?
Further curious conundrums bedevil Britain where, in the space of a week, children (and teachers) have been left in tears by the difficulty of a national English exam. But meanwhile, official stats show British children are now among the best readers in Europe. No chatbot could possibly wind up and frustrate progressives and conservatives so comprehensively as these two evilly conflicting situations. The “pampered snowflake” explanation of the former is cancelled out by the latter, and so is the bragging about “more enlightened teaching”.
The English improvement is widely credited to the retention of phonics* – teaching by sounding out letters – which is considered fuddy-duddy and style-cramping by many modern educationalists.
But no chatbot nails perverse artificial reality like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, bewailing their terrifying pursuit by New York paparazzi with all its harrowing connotations.
Turns out they simply didn’t want their photos taken. Any more. Police, doubtless with better things to do, had to sneak them in and out of the local nick to outwait the press after an awards ceremony – at which the duchess was happy to be photographed. No one but the couple regarded their transportation as dangerous or frightening. No one was charged with dangerous driving or speeding.
The chatbot hasn’t yet been invented that could stand in its truth and share its lived experience with more brio than the Sussexes.
Apologies for mentioning “phonics”, which is as big a furious letters generator as “fluoridation” – both topics are perhaps best left to AI for the sake of human sanity.
