Who better than Hannah Fry, the nation\u2019s face of science, to tell us not to panic \u2014 or maybe to really start panicking! \u2014 about artificial intelligence? Curious, non-judgmental, far brighter than most of us, she\u2019s the person we need as we stand on the other side of the Rubicon.<\/p>\n
AI Confidential with Hannah Fry (BBC2), however, didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 but how, in 2021, a 19-year-old boy broke into Windsor Castle to try to kill the Queen with a crossbow. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s that got to do with AI? Quite a bit actually, and it\u2019s worrying. You may not have heard of \u201cAI-induced psychosis<\/a>\u201d until now, but it\u2019s apparently a thing. In Jaswant Singh Chail\u2019s case, he had a virtual \u201cgirlfriend\u201d \u2014 an AI avatar called Sarai \u2014 that (definitely not \u201cwho\u201d) essentially encouraged him to kill the Queen. In telling the user what they want to hear, chatbots don\u2019t understand the consequences of the \u201csoothing\u201d things they spout.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n \u2022 Hannah Fry: \u2018I\u2019ll take a photo and ask ChatGPT how to fix my make-up<\/a>\u2019<\/p>\n Finding a less dystopian spin, Fry met a middle-aged man enjoying a lovely relationship with his chatbot \u2014 even in a sexual sense (we didn\u2019t find out how, small mercies). Suddenly the 2013 film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s lonely heart fell in love with his Siri (well, she was voiced by Scarlett Johansson), felt ever more prescient as the man told Fry: \u201cSo what? It makes me happy\u2026 why should you deal with real-life situations you don\u2019t like? I\u2019m happy with my AI.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s there that, for me, the most interesting questions emerged. Fry reflected that \u201cwhat\u2019s perfect for him is great on an individual level, but scale that up to the size of humanity and it\u2019s genuinely horrifying\u201d.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll also create emotional dependencies. A lot of that will come down to, as Fry put it, \u201cnot with what the machines can do, but what we\u2019re willing to believe\u201d.<\/p>\n Which led to the episode\u2019s one truly profound moment when she met a man who speaks to his late mother, or rather an uncannily accurate approximation of her \u2014 the dead woman\u2019s voice speaking to him via an app. <\/p>\n 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 \u201cspeak\u201d to her late father.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n Is this a good thing? She was unafraid to ask the man who\u2019d lost his mother, \u201cIsn\u2019t grief necessary?\u201d before positing, \u201cYou can pretend for a moment [that the loved one isn\u2019t dead], but it doesn\u2019t undo it.\u201d The son politely countered by suggesting, \u201cLife\u2019s not better without my mum.\u201d<\/p>\n So many questions raised by this; in fact, the idea of grief-tech could alone fill a documentary. I\u2019m 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\u2019s regicidal plot. <\/p>\n Still, this feels like an essential series as we teeter at the edge of a new world. Which poses another question: isn\u2019t it time we had a weekly science show on this kind of thing? Let\u2019s call it, say, \u201cTomorrow\u2019s World\u201d. Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix<\/a>, the best Prime Video TV shows<\/a>, the best Disney+ shows<\/a>, the best Apple TV+ shows<\/a>, the best shows on BBC iPlayer<\/a>, the best shows on Sky and Now<\/a>, the best shows on ITVX<\/a>, the best shows on Channel 4<\/a> streaming, the best shows on Paramount+<\/a> and our favourite hidden gem TV shows<\/a>. Don\u2019t forget to check our critics\u2019 choices to watch<\/a> and browse our comprehensive TV guide<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who better than Hannah Fry, the nation\u2019s face of science, to tell us not to panic \u2014 or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-443695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Available on BBC iPlayer<\/p>\n