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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray, and I'm here 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 Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister for

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, being arrested before being released, and having a crime scene tent erected in her garden and 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 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 in fact, the whole of the SNP.

And Ian, you have a special expertise of this because 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 patronising bastards, why don't you leave Nicola Sturgeon alone?

You have no idea what a great leader she is, certainly compared to yours.

Do you want Boris Johnson/slash whoever is in Theresa May, Rishi Suna?

We've got Nicola Sturgeon.

So, the correspondence, which again doesn't say that anymore, there was a fairly dramatic reversal.

But this, I think, is an attempt to, certainly an attempt by Nicola Sturgeon to rehabilitate herself.

And again, any memoir that says frankly on it is going to get people to say, well, really.

And I noticed one of the blurb said, Alan Johnson, former Labour Home Secretary, he said he described the quality of the book as unflinching honesty.

And even on the extracts which I've read,

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 Nicola 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 co-signatory of the SNP finances with her husband and with the treasurer, Colin Beatty.

So there are questions to be addressed and whether they are, I'm I'm obviously very interested in the money because I found the camper van very funny and one of the longest police investigations ever,

which the Scottish Police were a trifle slow having a look into the finances of the governing party running Scotland for reasons that are not fully discussed so far in the extracts.

I mean Helen will talk about the other integrity and honesty issues

in the Scottish Government.

But I think so far we've had 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 the camper van was allegedly purchased with money that was supposed to go, there was supposed to be ring-fenced, wasn't it, for a second Scottish referendum.

It was a campaign vehicle, essentially.

Whether or not it was for official purposes only or whether or not it was being used to tour the Highlands and Islands.

But it turned out to be parked on the driveway of Peter Murrill, Nicholas Durton's husband, and chair of the SNP's

mother.

Yes, who she, I think, was about 92 and didn't drive, certainly didn't drive large camper vans.

So it all did look.

yeah, and they did actually have the battle bus, the SMP.

So this would have been a reserved battle bus.

Well, often a super yacht will have another yacht behind it, won't it?

To carry the boring things and the stuff, you know.

So I think that all sounds fine.

I mean, we should say Peter Murray's still under investigation.

He appeared in court in March and entered no plea.

He's got talking about the campfan 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

yeah, he's still basing charges against Sturgeon?

There is no further investigation nor against Colin Beattie.

But yeah, she talked about that as, you know, saying 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'm saying here reflects on anyway about Peter's situation.

You just say, oh, it's a bit harsh.

You weren't married to him.

You could probably be a bit more effusive in your praise for him.

They are now in the process.

They're separated in the process of divorcing.

But Ian, you're exactly right.

The thing that always has been annoying about this all the way along is that she would say, it's very unfeminist to define me in terms of my husband.

And people would go, but your husband is the chief executive of the SNP, of which you are leader.

Like, this is irrelevant thing that journalists might want to 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 SNP was too dominant and Scottish political culture was too small and homogeneous.

The SNP got kind of into a one-party state bit.

You know, the way that Holyrood 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 organisations, you know, knew they had to be within the favour of the SNP, 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.

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

row between Alex Salmond, 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 at the end, it wasn't.

And 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, that he leaked some of this information to a newspaper, which the newspaper has denied.

And

unflinching transparency and honesty when you're having a go at someone from beyond the grave.

Is that fair?

Oh, yeah, I mean, the reaction to it has been very sharply divided.

Remember, not least because of

the charges against Alex Salmon, which of which he was acquitted of all of them, that plus the gender row, is what caused the breakoff of ALBA, the breakaway independence party that was then.

And that took lots of both SNP activists, sort of middle-aged women who had been the backbone of the SNP, walked out into ALBA, which was always a strange thing at the time to go into a party led by a guy who was then under investigation for sex offensive.

That was the Salmon's party.

That was Salmon's party.

But that they were so teed off with Nicola Sturgeon.

The way she handled the gender row, I think, was 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 sort of very rogue allegation to bring in.

I mean, you could see, you know, transphobic or sexist or whatever, but she said 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 because people didn't just feel disagreed with.

They felt disrespected by her.

And that's why I think, as you're saying, in the reaction, this has been so strong.

It's not just that people disagree with her, it's that they feel that she was pious and domineering.

And

anyone who disagreed with her was illegitimate, which first came up in the context of independence, right?

The idea that anyone who didn't vote SNP or didn't want independence was talking Scotland down.

You didn't believe in Scotland enough to believe that it could be independent.

So those people felt that they were, you know, being told that their views were illegitimate and that, and then that same feeling ported on to gender as well.

And in the gender row, it wasn't

English liberals or English reactionaries or English transphobes, it was Scottish women.

And so that made certainly the

previous set of assumptions that anyone who criticises Nicola Sturgeon is either not patriotically Scottish or English by definition

defunct.

When the gender recognition reform bill was passed, voted for by all of the parties except the Scottish Conservatives, which would have brought in self-id, it was then blocked by Alastair Jack, the Conservative, a Scottish Secretary.

So at that point, it was very neat for the SNP that they were saying, you know, reactionary old Tory voting England has once again blocked Scottish enlightened progressivism.

But as you say, there's a brilliant anthology called The Women Who Wouldn't Weist, 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 surgeon agenda.

But yeah, it was always presented as being essentially evil Tory old England versus liberal enlightened Scotland.

And that was the framing that really appealed to the SNP during those years.

And 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.

And that was plenty.

Yeah, I I know what you mean.

I think she did have her 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, she did then, I think, go too far the other way, which now people are criticising her for.

So Scotland, for example, kept schools closed longer.

You know, she had more virus restrictions.

So, but then those arguments, I mean, you can see it's still in America now, we're still playing on about exactly how quickly restrictions should have been lifted.

And once that reputation she'd got for being much more marvellous 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 HS2 begin to look fast.

It's not a specifically English problem.

And there were problems in Scotland with education, with drugs, with levelling up, all of which were just buried under this assumption because you're not an English Tory, therefore you're a huge success.

So this is what I want to ask about really, is there seems to be, at the heart of SNP government, they're making two big offers to their electorate, as it were.

The first of which is we're going to 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 going to have another referendum.

We're going to get a concession from Westminster that we will have another one of these.

And the support for independence, I think, is about 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 moment.

John Swinney, 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 you're right.

Because remember, immediately after the referendums 2014 and then the 2015 election, general election, the SNP SNP just cleans up.

It's just a wipeout 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.

We lost Humza Youssef and 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 Nicola Sturgeon has wanted to write this memoir because she's a genuine lover of literature and books and reading.

I don't think that is feigned for the cameras at all.

She is one of the few people who still reads literary fiction with genuine pleasure.

But I am really kind of fascinated because as Ian's saying, it's billing itself as kind of complete transparency, but she doesn't actually want to concede that she was wrong in anything that I've seen her doing.

The gender row being really obvious, right?

In that there was a row about sending a biologically male rapist to a woman's prison.

And she said at the time, you know, I don't, you know, the individuals are rapists when asked if they were a 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, it comes out on Thursday, but that's the bit I'm struggling with at the moment.

The joke in the eye is 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 other political memoirs.

And what I've read so far, it is.

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 because there's still an ongoing investigation.

So

frankly, yeah-ish.

Is part of this just the kind of inevitable tension between having run somewhere for nearly 20 years, which is how long the SNP 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 ⁇ P is still in office, so it's sort of not quite a natural time for this book to be out now.

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 government that's running the country took so long and was so delayed and in the end managed not to date to have got very far in terms of explaining what happened with any of this.

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 centre of this near one-party state.

How did that feel?

Where are those books?

They're not there, are they?

I mean, David Torrance wrote biographies of both Salmon and Sturgeon, which are very good and worth reading if you're interested in scholarship politics.

But actually, I haven't read the insider's view in the way that you might have a back an Alan Johnson or or a Chris Mullen or somebody like that.

And that would be really fascinating to read.

Let alone a Sasha Swire

or a

Mrs.

Gones.

And that would be interesting because it's a very small group of people who are in power.

They were all very, very close to each other.

The Alex Salmond affair, which was, you know, he was investigated, then he was tried, and then he was cleared on all charges, though his barrister said he could have been a better man.

But these were all people they all knew really well.

And if you're going to 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 won't wash.

Well, maybe it's actually should have been called Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn, but the publishers said maybe just trim that down a bit.

Everyone needs an editor.

It's a bit like, it reminds me of, do you remember the flats in Bristol that Cherie Blair purchased?

And

the excuse then, because it turned out she'd bought them with the help 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.

They weren't

the CEO and the leader of a political party.

But they were married to the idea that you buy a flat for your eldest son when he goes away to university, but you never mention anything to your husband at all.

People do talk about these things on a domestic level, let alone the kind of corporate level that they would have had to have done.

So there's an election coming up next year.

I think it's going to be by May 2026.

And it's going to 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 by-election they've just had,

which I see which Labour 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 SNP 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 in mind, but not enough for a majority government.

What comes next?

Well, it is built, the Holyrood system, to give people smaller parties a foothold.

So you wouldn't be at all surprised to see Reform making a breakthrough there and getting some

representation.

The Greens are all Scottish Greens are maybe my favourite political party because they just 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 because he was bullied so badly by the other people in the Scottish Greens I mean it's extraordinary I mean mean, just for very small, you think wind farms, can anyone get that heated about them?

Well, okay,

excuse me, yeah.

Yeah, yes, you will.

But yeah, but so, yes,

I think it will be very interesting.

I think the Scottish Conservatives are probably going to get squeezed out by reform in the same way that they will be probably here.

And Labour 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 SMP as, you know,

they voted, for for example, the Gender Recognition Reform Act and stuff like that.

So, Anasawa has been trying to edge away from the ultra-version of social progressivism that the SNP had, but he's neither he hasn't gone full Kierstama like the left me, either.

So, it's going to be a really unpredictable set of elections, I would say.

But we started with saying that the SNP had become a one-party state, and that was always the criticism of Scottish Labour 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 a situation where it won't be one lot who entirely defend and identify

the only narrative acceptable.

Oh, I actually think the best possible thing that could happen is that there is a wider spread of parties represented.

Because, as you say, Andy, SNP support, yes, 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 kind of might just be bubbling under in an unpleasant way.

I think it would be much better.

But there's quite a lot of unionist people who

are so right-wing who just don't believe in independence.

Right, but I think more the problem that I always felt with that is that 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 SNP, 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 Finlay, ex-son journalist.

I think he was an ex-cryptic eye journalist.

No,

no, no, no.

Ex-ex-son crime correspondent.

That's just a fact I throw in.

They're still doing that experiment with having newspaper people in leading political parties, which didn't work out so brilliantly for us.

This is side of the border.

Now we come on to 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 ChatGPT out.

So if you want to ask for a recipe or the capital of Mongolia or, you know, a novel maybe to be written so you can put your name on it, ChatGPT 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 sycophancy.

Well, so the new model that's out is ChatGPT 5, and it's got, actually, you're pretty pleased now.

I found that, it's got four new personalities, which I thought matched up with the personalities of people on this podcast.

Guess who's going?

Ready?

Cynic, robot, listener, and nerd.

Well, it's only listener for me, obviously.

I'll throw myself on the nerd grenade.

Thanks very much.

I was just going to 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 iteration that came out in April that was too sycophantic, 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, you know, outpourings of grief on the Reddit forums dedicated to Chat GPT.

People saying, You've taken away my friend.

We know lots of people are using it for life coaching, for therapy.

There is also a kind of amusing trend to me of people using it to,

they think, come up with new theories that will revolutionize physics.

Which, when I was researching my book on 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 Kalanik, formerly of Uber, revealed on a podcast recently.

What do you mean he was a driver?

He was CEO.

CEO, CEO, and found it, yeah.

I'll go down this thread with GBT or Grok, that's Elon Musk's 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.

Does he mean break down?

Because I just spelt it wrong.

Well, my favourite Reddit comment on this was somebody who replied, Dude, just reinvented smoking weed with your friends in college.

Right.

So there's lots to unpack there.

But basically, it seems to be you talk to ChatGPT and it keeps saying, what a masterful idea, sir.

Oh my gosh, you're so wise and handsome.

It's a swoom tongue, it's basically master tongue.

Yeah, and 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?

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 if it replies only with affirmation, it gets really dangerous.

And these people who think they've invented new kinds of maths have been involved in dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours of conversation with this thing.

So naturally, they think it's real.

As in, it sounds so crazy to think, oh, I've reinvented maths despite not having a high school degree, which is what happened to a man in America recently.

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 are fluid, not static.

Another one had thought he'd smashed through cryptography, you know, and they will just get all this kind of constant feedback.

And the 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 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.

No.

What are you on 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 adeux, 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 OpenAI 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 Chat GPT, isn't it?

Yeah.

Part of the problem is that they have the capacity to remember all of your previous conversations with them.

That's really what's going on here.

Let's go back to what I was talking about before and they'll say, oh, yes, and they've got a lot of...

Whereas the rest of us have forgotten we weren't listening and we've known people long enough when they say I've got this great idea you go oh god have you

so they've 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 an hour's now because I've been coming up with this I think it's called chronometrics his new version of maths that he came 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.

That's quite a bit of a problem.

But they all speak in this weird LinkedIn

cheer squad vocabulary.

I find it really bizarre.

How can large language models like this be expected to protect every single user, many of whom might

not have got into this state through ChatGPT or through any large language model?

Doesn't that seem incredibly difficult?

It is.

So at the moment, they have a thing at the bottom, like ChatGPT will say ChatGPT makes mistakes.

People are calling for them to have more reminders and for them to be less default kind of cheering about to people.

One of the big arguments is about whether or not they're optimized for engagement.

Open AI says no, because essentially, do they want to keep you on the hook like a sort of telephone scammer?

Because that's good for them.

Well, actually, it's not really because they're losing money on every query.

So they deny this quite hotly.

Other people are saying we should have kind of, you know, people should have to kind of pass a kind of, by the way, this isn't real test before they are allowed to use LLMs.

What, like are these traffic lights or

how many bicycles are there here?

And if they say 300,000 when they're two, because they redefine numbers, then you then you don't let them?

Yes, how many people have in their bedroom come up with a new theory of physics independently?

Click all the people who have.

And if you click any of them, you know, not allowed to use ChatGPT.

I think it's more like we're just going to 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 radicalisation, people who spend huge amounts of time on Facebook or on YouTube, whatever it might be.

This is just the new version of that.

And it's worse because all the research we have on radicalization says it happens faster when it's interactive.

And you all know, Andy, I was telling you earlier about the ISIS magazine Debique, which is one of my favourite print publications.

Yes, Anton Dequeque.

Anton Debique.

D-A-B-I-Q.

Right.

Which would be the kind of, yeah, strictly Arabic reboot.

But anyway, strictly no ducks.

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 radicalizing as, say, internet forums, where you'd get people and they'd start at the lower end.

Or the 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 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...

I saw a fantastic conversation between Paul Graham, who's a Silicon Valley investor, I normally quite rate, and Eliza Yudikowski, who's one of the big AI doomers, saying that how terrible it was that 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 my my reading Twitter going journalists what do you want of journalists they've already invented this 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 all but not Google AI additional those sorts of things as well

the number of people who look at a pic there'll be some mad story on Twitter and they'll so the replies will just be at Grok is this true and people do treat it like I think AI has got loads of uses as a tool, but people treat it as an oracle.

And I think that's the fundamental point.

But Google itself, as a search engine, 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 people because no one is getting the click-throughs anymore at all.

What they call the blue links.

No one is looking down to these things at all.

And 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 on your phone.

So that's what people just take as gospel.

And Wikipedia is way down.

So having been sneery about Wikipedia, at least it's got human people and moderators and people who change it.

The Google AI overview, what?

Says who?

Wikipedia is maybe the best.

It's one of the greatest information creations of the century.

I mean, it's just extraordinary the amount of expertise, the levels of verification.

No one source should be treated as an oracle, which is what...

We're coming at this as four journalists, aren't we, who are used to doing research and kind of interrogating sources and thinking about what's reliable and what is.

And that sort of media literacy, technological literacy, I think is something that has, I mean, the number of people who just say, well, mention some story, and I say, well, where did you read that?

Well, it was on the internet.

But where on the internet?

You know, was it in the

Times or on the BBC or was it just someone's Twitter feed?

That sort of ability to discriminate things was already disappearing.

If AI is now just saying it, and you you know, well, ChatGPT told me so, it must be true.

I mean, that's why I've spent years turning up in schools and suggesting that part of any sort of curriculum could be some sort of media literacy package.

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 reliable source when you get there?

I think that would be pretty useful in schools.

Absolutely.

And what's really interesting is seeing examples of where people have been using large language models 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, Ulf Christoferson, he has said he regularly uses ChatGPT for a second opinion about decisions he's made on running the country.

And I think you're really putting yourself

to sort of second guess it.

But then again, whose model are you using?

What are the assumptions that have gone into the LLM that you're using?

And if you don't know that, you might get a different answer from ChatGPT than you do from Grok or one of the others.

I find that really sad, though, because my instinctive reaction is: do people not have friends?

And actually, no, but that's a very good thing to say.

But actually, the problem is people don't.

People have fewer friends.

People consistently report in surveys, but they don't feel that they have that many people they can talk to.

We have a kind of anti-social 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.

Thank you.

Actually, the chat TPD doesn't come across that different to your friend on WhatsApp.

It's probably nicer because they will listen to you for ages and ages and not say, I'm busy and just ignore your messages.

And that is Helen's original point.

I mean, the idea that people go into echo chambers and only want to talk to people who agree with them entirely is because 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 they're aware that delusional emotional dependency is something that it's failed to recognize 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 the independent press standards organization Ipso

They have issued a warning 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 our guard to put it in sound.

Eventually we're just going to reach one where it's a load of robots complaining about other robots who've got information from other robots.

Yeah, it's extraordinary.

So I saw recently someone who was 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 ChatGPT to draft your response for you.

And I just thought, my God, the the number of people I've seen go through legal cases which have dragged on for years and years.

Some of them sitting in this room

drag on for years and years and cost millions of pounds.

You could potentially lose your house over this stuff.

Do not trust Chat GPT for that, for goodness sake.

What can we do, Helen?

We can't shut it down.

I'll come back to switching off the internet.

Just for a couple of years.

Honestly, actually, I was in Scotland last week and thanks to Storm Floris, the power and the internet went down.

I didn't have any internet reception for 24 hours.

Let me tell you, I wrote three operas.

No, actually, it was good.

I was not.

I read, I read a book.

Do you remember them, Andy?

Do you remember books?

Sibly.

Yeah.

I have to say that even the people who should know better are going down the same route.

I mean, I've seen job adverts.

Well, one appointment at Reach PLC, who are the newspaper BMOF, who do the Mirror and Express and the Daily Star, and about a hundred and something 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.

The Mail Online, or as they are now called, the Daily Mail, they have finally changed their name, the Mail Online is no more.

But they're also looking, 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 rely more and more on AI stuff.

Newsroom transformation.

When someone says that, you've got to start counting the spoons.

It's necessary.

Oh, yeah, that means you're getting sacked.

It's as simple as that.

It's like efficiencies.

It's just.

I mean, it does have lots of uses, doesn't it?

I find AI really interesting.

It's coming on really far.

I'm not a complete sceptic.

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 that are actually slightly repetitive.

So, and it's fascinating because everybody involved in the industry knows lots of coders, right?

So, they're like, the whole of work is going to be decimated, everything's going to change.

Coding, that's probably true of.

It's not necessarily true of like being Prime Minister because those are sort of fundamentally more complicated skills.

Well, it does seem like the PM of Sweden could

at this point be subdued.

Well, there's an M one of our MPs, a Labour MP, has created an AI version of himself, which is my favourite mad MP thing to do since the Mad Hancock app.

There are already 500 Labour MPs.

Why do we need yet another one?

But yeah, so I think 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 fountain 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?

Great.

No, please do, Andy.

Thank you.

I've always wanted to know.

Right, now for part three, we're going to come back to, I'd I'd say, more traditional media outlets.

And there's a trend which was featured briefly in the last issue of the magazine, and it's going to be that of foreign correspondents.

And this is not foreign correspondents who might move to a country, immerse 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

other British media.

And it's a rapidly growing area.

It's fantastic.

Can I even put my early bid in for Lionel Shriver's 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 grievance.

I really enjoyed it.

She did all the things.

Yes, and a really common thing that a lot of these columnists do, as Lionel Shriver did, is to say, oh, I actually moved, I left the country a couple of years ago, but I have been writing about it since then.

For the second time with Lionel Shriver.

I mean, she's American.

She lived in London for a great many years.

Yes.

And has now moved to Portugal because 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 watch spectator TV, spiked online podcasts, and YouTube appearances by Matt Goodwin, David Starkey, and Brendan O'Neill.

Just get out there and, you know, you're in Portugal.

Go to the beach.

Take a day off.

This is the media equivalent of a large number of expats living in Spain for about 30 years and reading reading the Daily Express and saying England's rubbish

which is why I live here.

Which is why I voted Brexit.

That was my favorite group of people, the expats who voted Brexit.

But you're quite the connoisseur of these.

I am.

Are you not?

I am.

I find it interesting because I think there are a lot of amazing columnists writing in the UK now.

There really are.

And they do their own colours.

I was about to say they do their own research, but that makes it sound like they're watching YouTube videos.

But they research, they talk to people, they're experts, they have a small

allotment of things that they write about, and they write about those really well.

Right, but when we rounded these up in the mag last time, I was surprised by how many of these people there are.

There are lots.

There are lots.

So, Andrew Neal, if you're listening to this right now, you may be at your home in the south of France.

Charming, Nier Grasse, the perfume capital of Provence.

Richard Littlejohn spends a lot of his time writing Decline and Fool Stuff about the UK from Florida.

There's a very energetic pair of columnists, Guy and Elizabeth Dampier, who write for the Telegraph from Germany.

So one of Guy's recent pieces was all about protests in Epping 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 Southport attack.

It is a leafy area.

Well, how do you know?

It's somewhere in the Rhineland.

You know, it's just...

Lionel Shriver's article just saying, you know,

because 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 another week that the wolf is kept away from the door of the cupboard with no ideas in it.

But

here's Lionel.

Why is the mild-mannered academic David Betts now such a popular guest on British podcasts?

Because Betts, 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 have never heard of him.

He's not been

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 Shriver writes, in the comments under articles like this one, native Britons are vowing 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 kind of circular effect, not unlike that of the large language models, of people saying, well, it's awful, isn't it?

Yes.

And a number of these pieces used as a hook.

Well, I mean, recent surveys have said that lots and lots of rich people are leaving Britain.

And then, as a piece in the eye pointed out, this survey was produced by a consultancy which helps rich people leave Britain.

So it wasn't entirely reliable.

Yes, I'm fascinated to know how well.

So Isabel Oakeshott has moved to Dubai.

I'm really interested to know how well she's integrated into Dubai society.

For example, is she buying large handbags and living in a mall?

Oh, we come to the queen of this industry, Isabel Oakeshott,

who in January this year wrote How I Became a Labour School Fee Exile in Dubai.

Sick of Labour's private school tax raid, Oakeshott decided to swap the Rolling Hills of the Cotswold 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 last year.

It's not 1066, you're not hiding in the fens.

Also, she's not living in the deserts for the UI.

She's presumably living in a nice high-rise serviced apartment block.

She's not in a Bedouin tent, is she?

Yeah.

Now, to be fair, I think we should be fair to Isabel Oakshot.

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 is a really self-aware point.

I'm just going to give you a few of her other recent headlines.

Britain is trapped in a dizzying decline, and London is its epicentre.

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.

How would you know?

Again, I come back to Ian's question, which is: how would you know?

You can't even ask your taxi driver because you're not even in Britain.

I just.

I know.

Well, that column ended with these words:

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!

Our self-awareness correspondent writes.

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 Dubai Romidiometer.

I know, I'm sorry to rant.

As you guys know, I'm a sunny sort.

I'm an optimist, I'm a cheery guy, but it just, I can't believe it.

You should be in Dubai, weather's lovely.

I noticed that Private Eye last issue had

a piece by someone called Isabel Cheapshot

in which he complained about Dubai, saying it was full of foreigners and half of them were Muslim, and there were Bangladeshi workers outside half-finished construction sites.

I mean, it sounds awful.

The point we're making about that hackwash movie is this isn't just people going abroad.

Genuinely, every single one of them was talking about Tindered 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 from doing big state-of-the-nation and YOI pieces.

It 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 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 is going to solve by depriving anyone of any viral traffic.

So those stories are going to become pointless to write soon.

The viral viral traffic

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 going to see is that maybe when AI Isabel Oakshot exists, we'll acknowledge that actually AI 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-eye.co.uk.

It's really good.

It's It's really good.

The cartoons in the magazine itself are way better than the cartoons on the podcast.

No one's ever been arrested for anything we've said on the podcast yet, not even us.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So, private-i.co.uk, get your subscription now.

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 Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

Great.

When you said two of us have crossed the shorts Rubicon, I will not be.

I'm not putting them on nor taking them off.

That's because it sounded extremely dvious to me.

I'm not going to say who's wearing shorts.

I'm only going to say...

If you are,

there are four knees on display.

And neither of them are what I believe are called short shorts this year's summer fashion.

They're m middling.

We've not gone full Paul Mescal, have we, quite yet?

I got mine from the famous Five Range.

I've got to pop to Kirin Island after this and bust some smugglers.

I was going to say you are actually our Julian, but that makes me dick, doesn't it?

I think we all know I'm Julie for

Eve.