Policymakers who think AI can help rescue flagging UK economy should take heed | Heather Stewart
From helping consultants diagnose cancer, to aiding teachers in drawing up lesson plans – and flooding social media with derivative slop – generative artificial intelligence is being adopted across the economy at breakneck speed.Yet a growing number of voices are starting to ask how much of an asset the technology can be to the UK’s sluggish economy.Not least because there is no escaping a persistent flaw: large language models (LLMs) remain prone to casually making things up.It’s a phenomenon known as “hallucination”.In a recent blogpost, the barrister Tahir Khan cited three cases in which lawyers had used large language models to formulate legal filings or arguments – only to find they slipped in fictitious supreme court cases, and made up regulations, or nonexistent laws.
“Hallucinated legal texts often appear stylistically legitimate, formatted with citations, statutes, and judicial opinions, creating an illusion of credibility that can mislead even experienced legal professionals,” he warned.In a recent episode of his podcast, the broadcaster Adam Buxton read out excerpts from a book he had bought online, purporting to be a compilation of quotes and anecdotes about his own life, many of which were superficially plausible – but completely fictitious.The tech-sceptic journalist Ed Zitron argued in a recent blogpost that the tendency of ChatGPT (and every other chatbot) to “assert something to be true, when it isn’t”, meant it was “a non-starter for most business customers, where (obviously) what you write has to be true”.Academics at the University of Glasgow have said that because the models are not set up to solve problems, or to reason, but to predict the most plausible-sounding sentence based on the reams of data they have hoovered up, a better word for their factual hiccups is not “hallucinations” but “bullshit”.In a paper from last year that glories in the title “ChatGPT is bullshit”, Michael Townsen Hicks and his colleagues say: “Large language models simply aim to replicate human speech or writing.
This means that their primary goal, insofar as they have one, is to produce human-like text,They do so by estimating the likelihood that a particular word will appear next, given the text that has come before,”In other words, the “hallucinations” are not glitches likely to be ironed out – but integral to the models,A recent paper in New Scientist suggested they are getting more frequent,Even the cutting-edge forms of AI known as “large reasoning models” suffer “accuracy collapse” when faced with complex problems, according to a much-shared paper from Apple last week.
None of this is to subtract from the usefulness of LLMs for many analytical tasks – and neither are LLMs the full extent of generative AI; but it does make it risky to lean on chatbots as authorities – as those lawyers found.If LLMs really are more bullshitters than reasoning machines, that has several profound implications.First, it raises questions about the extent to which AI should really be replacing – rather than augmenting or assisting – human employees, who take ultimate responsibility for what they produce.Last year’s joint winner of the Nobel prize for economics Daron Acemoglu says that given its issues with accuracy, generative AI as currently conceived will replace only a narrowly defined set of roles in the foreseeable future.“It’s going to impact a bunch of office jobs that are about data summary, visual matching, pattern recognition, etc.
And those are essentially about 5% of the economy,” he said in October.He calls for more research effort to be directed towards building AI tools that workers can use, rather than bots aimed at replacing them altogether.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionIf he is right, AI is unlikely to come to the rescue of countries – in particular the UK – whose productivity has never recovered from the global financial crisis and some of whose policymakers are ardently hoping the AI fairy will help workers do more with less.Second, the patchier the benefits of AI, the lower the costs society should be ready to accept, and the more we should be trying to ensure they are borne, and where possible mitigated, by the originators of the models.These include massive energy costs but also the obvious downsides for politics and democracy of flooding the public realm with invented content.
As Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute put this recently: “Everybody’s just throwing their empty cans into the forest.So it’s going to be much harder to have a nice walk out there because it’s just being polluted, and because those systems can pollute so much quicker than humans could.”Third, governments should rightly be open to adopting new technologies, including AI – but with a clear understanding of what they can and can’t do, alongside a healthy scepticism of some of their proponents’ wilder (and riskier) claims.To ministers’ credit, last week’s spending review talked as much about “digitisation” as about AI as a way of improving public services.Ministers are well aware that long before swathes of civil servants are replaced by chatbots, the UK’s put-upon citizenry would like to be able to hear from their doctor in some other format than a letter.
ChatGPT and its rivals have awesome power: they can synthesise vast amounts of information and present it in whatever style and format you choose, and they’re great for unearthing the accumulated wisdom of the web,But as anyone who has met a charming bullshitter in their life will tell you (and who hasn’t?), it is a mistake to think they will solve all your problems – and wise to keep your wits about you,
Disney and Universal sue AI image creator Midjourney, alleging copyright infringement
Disney and Universal sued an artificial intelligence company on Wednesday, alleging copyright infringement. In their lawsuit, the entertainment giants called Midjourney’s popular AI-powered image generator a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” for its alleged reproductions of the studios’ best-known characters.The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios, making and distributing without permission “innumerable” copies of their marquee characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The suit by Disney and Universal over images and video represents a new frontier in the raging legal wars over the copyright and the creation of generative artificial intelligence
‘They went too far’: Musk says he regrets some of his posts about Trump
Elon Musk has expressed contrition for some of his tweets about Donald Trump last week, in an apparent effort to retreat from an explosive falling out that has threatened to damage the Tesla boss’s business interests.Musk was by far the biggest donor to Trump’s presidential campaign, but tensions between the two erupted into public view last week and rapidly escalated, as the world’s richest man called for the president’s impeachment and mocked his connections to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a series of posts.On Wednesday, Musk posted on X, the social network he owns: “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.”Musk’s public apology came after the tech billionaire privately called Trump on Monday night, the New York Times first reported, citing three people familiar with the matter
Meta to announce $15bn investment in bid to achieve computerised ‘superintelligence’
Meta is to announce a $15bn (£11bn) bid to achieve computerised “superintelligence”, according to multiple reports.The Silicon Valley race to dominate artificial intelligence is speeding up despite the patchy performance of many existing AI systems.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, is expected to announce the company will buy a 49% stake in Scale AI, a startup led by Alexandr Wang and co-founded by Lucy Guo, in a move described by one Silicon Valley analyst as the action of “a wartime CEO”.Superintelligence is described as a type of AI that can perform better than humans at all tasks. Currently AI cannot reach the same level as humans in all tasks, a state known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)
UK students and staff: tell us your experiences with AI at university
The use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools are becoming increasingly commonplace in UK higher education. A February survey of 1,000 students showed an “explosive increase” in use of generative AI in particular over the previous 12 months.With this in mind, we’d like to find out more about how AI is affecting students at university.How has AI impacted your studies? Have you used AI tools? Have you been suspected of using AI when you haven’t? What guidance have you been given by universities or tutors about using AI? Do you have any concerns?We’d also like to hear from university teaching staff – what is the impact of AI on students’ work? What are the challenges?You can tell us about your experiences with AI at university using this form.Please share your story if you are 18 or over, anonymously if you wish
As big tech grows more involved in Gaza, Muslim workers are wrestling with a spiritual crisis
Is working in big tech halal? Muslim workers are reckoning with the possibility that their jobs go against their religious obligationsBefore Ibtihal Aboussad was fired by Microsoft for protesting the company’s work with the Israeli military during a celebration of the firm’s 50th anniversary, she sent two emails.The first went to all of her colleagues. She appealed to their universal humanity and urged them to stand against Microsoft’s contracts to provide cloud computing software and artificial intelligence products to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).She sent the second to the “Muslims at Microsoft” email list. Its subject line read: “Muslims of Microsoft, Our Code Kills Palestinians
AI can ‘level up’ opportunities for dyslexic children, says UK tech secretary
Artificial intelligence should be deployed to “level up” opportunities for dyslexic children, according to the UK science and technology secretary, Peter Kyle, who warned there was currently not enough human capacity to help people with the learning difficulty.Kyle, who is dyslexic and uses AI to support his work, said the government should carefully look at “how AI can transform education and help us assess and understand a young person’s abilities into the future”.He spoke as the TV chef Jamie Oliver, who is also dyslexic, launched a campaign calling for improved teacher training on dyslexia and earlier screening of children to detect the condition sooner. About 6 million people in the UK are estimated to have dyslexia, which primarily affects reading and writing skills.Kyle told the Guardian he had felt “quite emotional” when seeing AI technology used to help young people learn with “incredible empathy, encouragement and knowledge”
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