Who better than Hannah Fry, the nation’s face of science, to tell us not to panic — or maybe to really start panicking! — about artificial intelligence? Curious, non-judgmental, far brighter than most of us, she’s the person we need as we stand on the other side of the Rubicon.

AI Confidential with Hannah Fry (BBC2), however, didn’t begin quite where one might have expected. Not with how AI is going to replace our jobs, whether we can believe any video clip posted online, and so on — but how, in 2021, a 19-year-old boy broke into Windsor Castle to try to kill the Queen with a crossbow.

What’s that got to do with AI? Quite a bit actually, and it’s worrying. You may not have heard of “AI-induced psychosis” until now, but it’s apparently a thing. In Jaswant Singh Chail’s case, he had a virtual “girlfriend” — an AI avatar called Sarai — that (definitely not “who”) essentially encouraged him to kill the Queen. In telling the user what they want to hear, chatbots don’t understand the consequences of the “soothing” things they spout.

Fry went on to explore how this is indicative of something much bigger going on. Another young man, this one sane, recalled how Chat GPT fuelled his brief breakdown, where he started believing he was living in a simulated world, Matrix-style. We saw clips of news reports about chatbots that seemed to have encouraged troubled young people to kill themselves.

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Finding a less dystopian spin, Fry met a middle-aged man enjoying a lovely relationship with his chatbot — even in a sexual sense (we didn’t find out how, small mercies). Suddenly the 2013 film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely heart fell in love with his Siri (well, she was voiced by Scarlett Johansson), felt ever more prescient as the man told Fry: “So what? It makes me happy… why should you deal with real-life situations you don’t like? I’m happy with my AI.”

It’s there that, for me, the most interesting questions emerged. Fry reflected that “what’s perfect for him is great on an individual level, but scale that up to the size of humanity and it’s genuinely horrifying”.

An idea that I took from all this is how loneliness is going to be an increasingly significant part of the AI revolution: AI friendship will comfort us; it’ll also create emotional dependencies. A lot of that will come down to, as Fry put it, “not with what the machines can do, but what we’re willing to believe”.

Which led to the episode’s one truly profound moment when she met a man who speaks to his late mother, or rather an uncannily accurate approximation of her — the dead woman’s voice speaking to him via an app.

Fry tried out the tech by feeding her own voice into the app. Suddenly here was a very convincing Hannah Fry talking out of the machine, completely artificially generated. Fry was astonished, and soon in tears as she considered how she could, if she so wanted, use the app to “speak” to her late father.

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Is this a good thing? She was unafraid to ask the man who’d lost his mother, “Isn’t grief necessary?” before positing, “You can pretend for a moment [that the loved one isn’t dead], but it doesn’t undo it.” The son politely countered by suggesting, “Life’s not better without my mum.”

So many questions raised by this; in fact, the idea of grief-tech could alone fill a documentary. I’m also not sure the first episode needed to be, at times, couched in the language of true-crime documentary when it periodically returned to Chail’s regicidal plot.

Still, this feels like an essential series as we teeter at the edge of a new world. Which poses another question: isn’t it time we had a weekly science show on this kind of thing? Let’s call it, say, “Tomorrow’s World”.
★★★★☆
Available on BBC iPlayer

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