Free Speech Is Back!

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Hello and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And there's Armanda Unicci.

And this week we are making the most of having our free speech back.

Yay!

Before we go into the vital topic of free speech, and I know everyone is dying to at long last have this discussed.

What have you been up to since last week?

I went to see the production of the producers, the musical original by Mel Brooks and someone else who I'm therefore failing to credit at the Mania Chocolate Factory in London.

It's a small theatre, tiny, tiny theatre.

Really, like 200 seats.

So it was Andy Nyman, who might be familiar to people.

I think he's in Wicked, actually, among other things.

I loved it.

It's very, very funny.

And the thing that kept coming back to me was that I went and looked up when the original film was when it was 1967.

And so for people who have been living in a hut, the premise of the producers is that a bad Broadway producer learns he can make more money with a flop than a hit and decides to stage the most tasteless and badly directed musical he possibly can called Springtime for Hitler, a gay romp for Ava and Adolph in Buchter's Garden.

And unfortunately, it's brilliant and everyone loves it.

Yeah, so they don't make their money.

And where did you say it was originally?

1967.

So this is the bit that got to me.

It's obviously it's written by Jewish creators, but they were making jokes essentially about the attempted annihilation of their people

20 years earlier.

I mean, it's like now having a musical about 9-11.

You You know, that's how recently it is.

Exactly.

And it had always in my head been down as one of my favorite movies of all time.

There's a, I think I've mentioned it before, there's fantastic when the show, the stage show opens and it's clearly a glorification of Nazidom.

The camera pans across a row of people in the...

in the audience frozen in horror and just the looks on their faces of what they've paid to come and see is just one of the funniest things ever.

No, I spent a lot of time as my kids were growing up saying how great the producers was.

So eventually I managed to get them to agree to watch it with me.

And so this must have been about, what, 10 years ago?

Put it on.

Fine.

Funny, funny, funny.

I had forgotten in the original film, 20 minutes is spent with them as a treat for themselves, buying themselves a Swedish receptionist.

who spends her entire scene just in a fur-clad bikini saying things like,

and my daughter, quite rightly, turned to me as if to say, what the hell are you doing?

Well, why is this on?

Unfortunately, there is an established problem, which is things have really changed quite quickly in that.

You know, the films even I grew up with on the late 90s and 2000s, it was quite often everything was seen from a male perspective.

And then women occasionally featured a sort of scenery in the background.

But, you know, the number of female lead characters was extremely low.

And then you go back another 20 years before that, and people, you know, James Bond films films were quite

casually sexually assaulting people.

Yeah.

And that being a thing that people would just do along the way and it was never mentioned again.

Exactly.

But I kind of, I'm interested in why the fact I had completely forgotten that.

Do you know what I mean?

I had sort of blanked that from my memory in much the same way.

You know, if you go back and you watch even Markman Wise shows, some of their classic shows.

Quite a lot of it is just very basic innuendo.

But we don't remember those bits.

We remember the Andre Preven and the stairs that lead nowhere and the, you know, dancing in the kitchen and so on quite rightly they're fantastic but actually the norm was something else it's a great it's a great lesson in the fallibility of memory and the way that you rewire things and yeah you're right in psychology this concept called the peak endrail which is in any experience you remember the peak of it and you also remember the end of it yes and actually your brain sort of tidies away lots of other stuff and i've watched blade runner you know touted as one of the greatest sci-fi movies all time and the blade runner whatever it was 2049 came out recently i thought well go back and watch the original it's a whole sequencing with one of the, are they called Blades?

The humanoids, the androids.

Replicants, yes.

She's running and it's put in slow motion and as she runs in slow motion, her top falls off.

Classic.

And you see everything in the ways of extras.

And it's like, oh yes, the detail on getting on to Luke Human is extraordinary.

I mean, it was a real kind of carry-on.

And I thought, what's this to do?

Again, why is that?

But there's quite notoriously, I have never read it, but someone rediscovered and put on social media a couple of years ago.

The fact that the original book of The Godfather has a very long subplot about one of the character's wives getting a labia plasty operation.

Okay.

And you just, you think, oh, lovely mafia drama, you know, horse's head in the bed, and you don't really remember, you know, that wisely, when they adapted it for the film, they went, kill cup.

Yeah, I think we can leave that there.

No, no, no.

We just want the guns stuffed, don't we?

And the family.

But the sad thing, I think, about...

It certainly brings us into the topic of freedom of expression.

Freedom of expression.

Well, I think that's a very good example about, I don't know what the original reception to the producers was.

It may very well have offended quite a lot of people.

I think certainly coverage, shock, I think, are we allowed to laugh at this?

More about the

making jokes about the Nazis and dances in the shape of a swastika and so on.

And a send-up of Buzzley-Barkley techniques, but

sort of

swastika.

And there was that.

I think for that, rather than the casual sexism and misogyny that was just, you know, just baked in to that era.

Can I introduce you to someone who cares a great deal about free speech?

Oh, right.

Bring them in.

And that is Mark Zuckerberg.

Oh, at last.

Head of Meta.

Until recently, supported by Nick Clegg, formerly of this parish.

But Nick Clegg has gone as their head of public policy to be replaced by a Republican, Joel Kaplan.

And that may give you a teeny, tiny clue as to some of the political background to Mark Zuckerberg's announcement.

Shed a light on what exactly Nick Clegg's role was prior to all this.

Was he there just to kind of,

as the phrase is, meet in the room, just to kind of tell people.

He can't sell a quote, Amanda.

Come on.

Tell people,

look, I've got a kind of a nice, cuddly person from Britain.

He's a lib dead.

No one dislikes them.

So please leave me alone.

Please, I've spent all my last 20 years apologising for getting it wrong.

Surely I've got it right.

Oh, no.

No, I've got it wrong again, actually.

One of the funniest things I read about this was by Max Reid on Substack, who said that, like the inauguration, every four years, Mark Zuckerberg does come out and re-announce what he thinks Facebook is all about, depending on the prevailing political winds.

And we should treat it as a kind of, you know, like the kind of punksitory Phil coming out of his burrow.

This is just something that happens.

I know.

I went through way back, you know, the early days of this podcast, the timeline of Mark Zuckerberg's apologies for getting it wrong.

And now he's come on and more or less said, oh, those apologies were wrong.

I want to go back to my roots.

Having just explained that my roots were terrible, well, I've spent 20 years trying to improve it but no i want to now go back to that which is as everyone pointed out and if you've seen the social network the film you'll know the roots of facebook were a website in which you could rate the hotness of women at your college yeah so it's out really gone in five of you not far enough back to it possibly go wrong yeah um what was your favorite line from his announcement he was once again in the free speech business okay well i printed off his statement here which as somebody said did look like a kind of hostage video it was in a tiny little room it's hard to separate it from his sort of makeover someone described him, this is not a very useful reference for many of our listeners, as now looking like Drake's molly dealer, which to translate that from American into English is essentially a rapper's ecstasy dealer.

He's grown out his hair, which is very curly, and he always now wears a gold chain and he always wears a sort of t-shirt.

And he's got very into Brazilian jiu-jitsu, so he's ripped, he's shredded now.

So he has kind of adopted a completely different style.

You know, he looked once he sort of looked nerdy and wore added as sliders.

Yeah.

And now he's sort of jacked and kind of like a little sort of lad.

Yeah.

I mean, the sentence that we'll get on to this, but I just want to tee it up now is the sentence towards the end of his statement was, Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world.

Well, going after American companies and pushing to censor more, right?

So his idea is that he's going to work to deal with the terrible plague of lack of free speech overseas.

Yeah.

So he's saying, you know, this network, this platform, which was really about connecting communities, I now want to enforce the American government's take on where we are at with free speech on everyone.

The trouble with that is, though, the thing that he was apologising for was enforcing the American government's take on free speech on people before, right?

So, one of the main contentions that he later went on the Joe Reagan podcast to complain about was that Biden officials phoned him up to scream about the stuff he was publishing on COVID.

And they put pressure on him about, for example, things about the efficacy of vaccines or the origins of the coronavirus or whatever it might be.

And so he said, you know, previously I was pressured by the government to follow the government line, and that was bad.

However, there's a new government, and that line is now good.

And

objectively, this is the good government.

So I'm going to do everything.

You know, there's an implication here.

You know, Facebook is now a large media conglomerate driven by the state, by the US state, because by the Trump administration that he wants to work hand in hand with, isn't he implying the entire intelligence gathering operation that the US government controls?

He's gone back to what his criticism was, that too many governments are are interfering in how we exchange information and communicate with each other.

I think that's the thing.

It's very hard to separate my feeling that this is just rank opportunism from a serious consideration of the proposals he's having.

So he was saying, you know, the Biden administration officials shouted at us.

And I sort of thought, this is not very worthy of me, sack up, Mark.

Talk to any political journalist or any investigative journalist, and they will tell you a time that they were shouted at by a government press officer or spin doctor.

That just happens.

Right.

And what you do is you go, I'm sorry, I've got a set of principles or I think this story is true and we're just, you know, we're going to publish it.

And I sort of think, you know, you own an enormous tech company.

You can't.

Yeah, okay, so maybe they might try and...

He's the problem being that he has been in this position since he was a tiny child.

So he doesn't know anything else.

He doesn't know.

He hasn't quite taken on board the fact that

his company is like an outlet for news, it is an outlet for information.

It does have a journalistic function as well as a gossip function and entertainment function.

But he's trying to define himself outside all those rather trad areas as if somehow he's special.

And if he's special, he needs to be treated specially and treated differently and exempted from a lot of these responsibilities.

I think that's exactly it.

That's the bit that has always annoyed me about this.

It's like, why do you keep asking me to impose editorial standards on this in a way that is getting in the way of me not making as much money as I can?

And Facebook makes a shared load of money from advertising by saying we're a platform, not a publisher.

And that means, for example, you don't have as many content moderators, even as they were.

Then a nutritional news organization would employ editors and fact-checkers within the house.

So you can, you know, your volume is much better.

You can put out more stuff because you're not, you know, editing it like it would be done in a newspaper.

And he's sort of complaining about that.

The other thing I find totally hypocritical is that Trump last year, in a book called Save America, his coffee table book, said if there was any repeat of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan putting money into their election integrity initiative, which Trump sees as being denying the fact that he won the 2020 election, he would lock him up.

And would you like to hear a classic piece of Trump mania writing, which he wrote in a book?

He said, Zuk would come to the Oval Office to see me.

He'd bring his very nice wife to dinners and be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful lockboxes in a true

plot against the president.

We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election.

So I don't buy this premise that the Biden administration was putting undue pressure.

And thank God the era of free speech is here now.

Because this guy threatened to lock him up.

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This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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I want to read, if you're going to quote Trump, I'm going to quote Zuckerberg back.

Okay.

Because this was in his statement.

I just want to follow and just try and pause the layers of logic here that he's been using to try and justify justify this decision to get rid of fact-checking.

Even saying the phrase, get rid of fact-checkings.

That's uber Orwellian, isn't it, really?

When truth need no longer be verified.

This is the way where you and I are going to disagree.

Well, we can't but yeah, go on reading with me.

Hit me with your best advice.

We will.

And you say, yes, you will.

And then I say, no, no, no.

No, you're right.

We're right.

Yeah.

Okay, right.

There's been widespread, this is Zuka, there's been widespread debate about the potential harms from online content.

Governments and legacy media, legacy media, bad legacy media, have pushed to censor more and more.

A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.

Legitimately bad, as opposed to, I don't know, informally bad, pleasantly bad, I don't know.

Legitimately bad stuff.

Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.

Those are the bad things, right?

These are things that we take very seriously, of course.

I mean, he's not going to say, we don't.

Yeah, I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?

And I want to make sure that we handle responsibly, okay, first mention of responsibility that comes with your influence.

So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.

But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts.

I mean, there's an argument there as to Yeah, any system makes mistakes, not just complex ones.

You'd think that complex ones, by their complexity, would make fewer mistakes than most.

But anyway, go with that.

So, even if they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of hosts, that's millions of people.

So, 1% is millions of people.

And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.

And so, we're going to get rid of fact-checking.

So,

because of the potential of 1% of the decisions made being incorrect, the entire decision-making

process is going to be lifted.

I mean, that is like, that's like, say you opened a restaurant and you asked people for the point of view, you know, how's it going?

Are you enjoying the meal?

And somebody said, you know, there aren't enough seafood choices in the menu.

Oh, well, fine, we'll look at that.

How about yourself?

Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

It's delicious.

Yeah.

But I agree, there's just not enough seafood.

And at that point, the person running the restaurant just going, okay, right, everyone.

From now on, it's just going to be seafood.

All right.

Seafood for everyone.

I don't care care if you don't like it.

That's it.

I've had too many people here saying there's not enough seafood for everyone.

Welks, mussels.

Oysters.

Oysters.

Yeah, I know.

I was thinking, how many seafood?

How many diagnoses?

I think it's difficult.

I think that the problem was that he is correct to say that Facebook's fact-checking regime essentially became a liberal fact-checking regime because the most of the people who got into the misinformation field were liberal academics in universities.

So, for example, there were misinformation experts who argued quite strongly last year that, you know, the claim that Biden was senile, and you can say, was that a technical medical diagnosis?

Well, no, it was obviously being used colloquially to say he's, you know, he's gone off the boil.

Yeah, that was terrible misinformation.

And then people watched the debate and they went, oh, he does look quite old, actually.

And I think there was pissnickety things like that.

And the errors went in one direction.

Yes.

And I think that's what damaged trust in the whole system.

Yes.

But is the solution to that?

And I kind of agree with you in that there was an over-rigorous application of it's what we've discussed often enough when people haven't been consulted.

You cannot legislate how people think or what opinions they have.

And if you have to legislate for it, then you've kind of failed.

It's all about persuasion and argument.

And argument involves differences of opinion being able to be aired and some kind of conversation taking place, but also people in that discussion being prepared.

to learn from each other.

And we've now ended up with this fossilized discourse where, you know, you're either for me or against me.

If you don't agree with me, I want you to leave.

Rather Rather than, that's interesting.

I disagree, but

tell me more why you think this.

And having a legitimate forum for that kind of conversation, I think is fine.

And I think there is, I think he touches on something that actually drove quite a lot of the Trump supporters in the election, that too many people...

had been unbidden, had been telling them what to say and do.

That's fine if we can get into more

an area where we can actually discuss things.

I think the left got quite scoldy during that period.

And as somebody who was at the sharp end, the way that I wrote about gender, for example, circa 2020, people were quite honestly saying to me that you shouldn't be allowed to use the phrase biological sex.

And that was just something that was now a deeply offensive term.

And you sort of thought, I mean, to me, that was Orwellian, that wasn't New Speak.

It was an attempt to stop you even be able to make a set of arguments by removing.

Exactly.

And, you know, the vocabulary to me.

People would say, it should have been possible for people to say, I disagree with you using that phrase, and here's why.

Rather than get out.

Yeah, right.

and i think that's it but i think one of the things if you read back through all this stuff it just shows you how difficult these decisions are to make and particularly at at scale the way that we've traditionally handled this is by having a plural press right with conservatives and liberals in it and they have different news values and different ideas of where the lines are and there's a kind of scrap what the problem has been i think with with these massive social networks is they're just huge i remember emily bell who's now an academic in new york saying to me once we should think of them probably more like utilities companies you know yeah and the way that the water companies supply your water, these guys supply your information.

And Facebook is, well, I would say it's on its sort of downswing now, but it's not like there's a lot of alternatives to it.

You know, they have huge network effects by definition.

Yes, but also what's happened is the way it operates, it benefits from more and more extreme opinions.

or it hampers the ability to do what we're doing.

We just have a discussion

and see where we agree and see where we don't agree.

Whether it's because you're restricted to a certain number of letters or you're you're posting something publicly and it's all very reactive and immediate, most discussions very, very quickly lead to this heightened area where there are two sets of opinion that are violently opposed to each other and neither of them willing to back down or acknowledge the right for the other person to disagree.

Yes.

And that's my concern is that there's no sense of gradation.

It's either you cannot see any of these things or you can say whatever you like.

And we've seen what's happened with X since that has been applied.

It's very, very rapidly turned into a quite

unless my feed is atypical, but whenever I turn it on, all I get is, you know, industrial scale levels of

racism, not just racism, just hate in various modes of expression.

I mean, I think that it used to be an unrepresentative left-wing platform as Twitter, and it's now an unrepresentative, right-wing-dominated platform as X.

You know, and I knew people who I think were unfairly banned under the old regime at Twitter.

It was very, you know, tight.

And one of the things that Zuckerberg said, which I think is true, and people have to sort of deal with whether they like it or not, is the fact that some things have been banned on social media that are majority opinions within the population.

And that's very difficult to

keep a lid on.

And that actually creates discontent.

It creates suspicion and lack of confidence in not just politics, but any kind of discourse on the media.

And we've seen how easy it is to label any outlet you disagree with, just call it legacy media.

Legacy media is such a great phrase.

Legacy media.

I think the Atlantic over Christmas saying, you know, the use of the word mainstream media is now just completely divorced from any idea of who is actually getting the eyeballs.

Yeah.

You know, Joe Rogan's podcast is about the most mainstream media you can get.

And, you know, it's the number one podcast in the world and has been for yonks now.

And yet, you know, the kind of Detroit bugle is the hated mainstream media, even though it's got a few tiny readers and a tiny budget.

So, we have to move on from these definitions.

The new mainstream

is new mainstream.

Absolutely.

Facebook is mainstream.

But they obviously don't want to be regulated like a publisher.

Yeah.

They just want to say, let a thousand flowers bloom.

It's almost like going back to the roots: is you know, when I started off at a little bed sit in Harvard or whatever, you know, I'm trying to get that again, even though, you know, he's obsessed with Roman emperors.

He is.

His daughters, quite famously, are called Augustus Maxima.

Augusta Maxima.

And some of them, I mean, I don't think one's called Caligula, but

that's the general trend of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the one thing that is interesting from the point of view of free speech is that the model that he's suggesting, so they are keeping at the moment fact checkers in the UK and Europe, but the fact that the model he's suggesting in America is essentially close to Twitter X's community notes.

And they've got one feature which I didn't know about until this week that I think is very clever, which is that if someone posts something and there's a contentious claim and a false claim, people can vote on whether or not they think you should have a a community note with sourcing appended to it.

And in order for that community note to succeed and get pasted on the bottom of it, it needs to attract votes from users who have previously disagreed on issues.

So it stops it being gamed by one side or the other.

I think that the kind of best spaces on the internet are places that have really engaged moderators who care deeply about stuff, but that don't have all one set of political opinions.

And then you do get a bit of what you were talking about, right?

The kind of back and forth that hopefully you come to some sort of synthesis and and like an agreed shared reality.

Well, you say that, but I haven't seen this sense of it calming down on X.

Well, it's very funny that Elon Musk is one of the most community-noted people.

But it hasn't stopped him.

No, it obviously hasn't.

And it's very much, community-notes are very much after, you know,

lock it after the horse has bolted, because once the headline is out there that, you know, Bermanj Yanucci is a terrible knob.

If somebody says that, well, you could put a fact, you know, well, I've met him.

He's not as bad as you think.

I mean, he's awful, but he's not as bad as you think.

But by then, it's gone.

It's gone viral.

And also,

you know, they talk about it being a town square, but there are codes of conduct for being in a town square.

And what this absolutist approach is saying is, no, you can turn up the town square drunk and you can shout any amount of filth you like.

At some point, someone might ask you to leave.

But to be honest, there's so many of you, I doubt whether or not they'll have time to kind of home in on you because there'll be so many other people shouting.

It'd be like me going into a shop where every magazine says I remind you, she's a terrible knob.

And I hand over my money for the

private eye.

I'll have a private eye.

And no, I'm not giving it to you because you're a terrible knob.

You know, it's that.

And how people cope with that, you know, I don't see in Mark Zook.

I mean, he says here, we're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.

So that's very much conceding there.

We're going to do it after the event.

The reality is that this is a trade-off.

It means we're going to catch less bad stuff,

but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that were accidentally taken down.

I mean, I'm going to catch less bad stuff.

I'm going to say that if for some mad reason in 2029, the US inaugurates an incredibly socialist president,

Mark Zubwell will come out of his burrow like Punks at Tawny Phil and say to, actually, I thought about it and I think discrimination is a really big issue.

I know, and we're going on a journey here, and I think I'm reading the message loud and clear.

Yeah, exactly.

I've been on a a journey.

He will have been on.

I've got a content moderation.

Who knows what he'll look like by then?

He'll have come dressed as, I don't know, like a sort of tweedy professor or something that the left likes.

But you know, you know, it's fact-checking what if I said there is fact-checking on meta.

Yeah.

So you say, no, there isn't.

No, there isn't.

Then what happens?

Well, I mean,

how do I...

But you know what I mean.

How do you verify that there isn't fact-checking?

Yeah, well, that's true.

Yeah, who fact-checks the fact-checkers themselves?

But fundamentally, what we've learned here is that this is a commercial company that

wants to go with the prevailing winds because it wants to continue operating.

It is not like a traditional journalistic operation that says we've got a set of principles and if that upsets politicians,

sorry.

And I think that's call me a shill for the legacy media all you want, but that is traditionally why.

If you find a newspaper or magazine that's in tune with your set of values and you believe,

you should be able to have more confidence that they will continue to perpetuate those values rather than what we're obviously seeing here, which is an attitude of free speech that very much depends on who's in power.

Exactly.

And that person in power is saying, actually, no one is in power.

It's over to you.

You can choose it.

Whereas, in fact, they are the ones selected.

And we've got to make the distinction between fact-checking and content moderation.

So fact-checking is, or removing fact-checking, is people being able to express opinions or even state as facts things that might not be, but they're under less scrutiny or less sense of being prohibited from saying that in the first place.

Content moderation is that very physical act of people catching stuff online that is illegal, that is more than just offensive,

portrays harm to someone.

It's the most brutal, gruesome, grim bits of video.

And content moderators,

I mean, the phrase implies that these are people with ethics degrees and what.

It's not.

It's people who've been paid not very much money away from

the development source to

sit all day watching terrible things and and give it and being told you have 30 seconds to decide whether that terrible thing should stay up or come down and it's causing a lot of you know there's a almost like a class action in kenya from content models against facebook i know that's action against facebook in ireland people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder but it's a very real thing it's the it's basically it's the terrible end of uh of the internet.

The bad stuff.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that used to affect

foreign correspondents and war correspondents.

You know, they would come back from the front and they would really, really suffer from it.

And to some extent, we've all become journalists and therefore, you know, those effects are distributed much more widely.

For me, it's telling me that social media like Facebook and so on, there isn't an analogy for them.

We keep saying it's a bit like journalism, it's a bit like broadcasting, it's a bit like a universal.

It's a new thing, it's a new thing, and we haven't had time to work out how best to run it and to use it and to monitor it or to get the best from it.

And it may be too late.

Well, if you'd like to send us a community note, you can do so by emailing strongmessage here at bbc.co.uk.

Well, before we go, I just want to drag us back to Britain for a moment.

Yes, lift my spirits, please.

To give you an update on Kirstama's weird metaphors.

We enjoyed the tepid bath of managed decline.

But the government said last week that it would, quote, mainline AI into the veins of this enterprising nation.

Do you want to have AI mainlined into your veins, Amanda?

How do you feel about that?

Did somebody not say to him, Luke, when you go out there and sell AI, do not liken it to dangerous drugs that have been bought in some shady street corner somewhere.

If there's one thought you have in your head when you go out and sell this, it's not that one, please.

And then five seconds later, oh, he's gone and done it, hasn't he?

He's gone and said it.

Worse, even than him saying it in a speech, they put it in a press release.

Someone wrote it down, someone thought about it in advance and thought, this is it, we've got it, guys.

Why don't we jam the needle of AI directly into the eyeball of intention?

It's not like AI already doesn't have a bit of a bad press.

You know, if you mention AI, and

again, this is when I get confused because my initials are AI.

And whenever I see an AI headline, I think, what have I done now?

You know, there is already concern.

Yeah.

I talked the other week week about, you know, Stephen Hawkins at Stephen Hawkins saying, whatever you do, watch AI.

It could kill us all.

So you really want to be going out there selling it with some, a bright,

if you want to counter that with a brighter metaphor.

Domestic, you know, not the killer robots.

Actually, we'll be good.

Sorry.

I know when we call them killer robots.

We meant killing in a good, yeah.

Anyway.

Yes.

Not an unknown chemical that will course around your body.

Yeah.

Well, that's all we've got time for this week.

Thank you for listening to Strong Message here.

We'll be back next week.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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