When AI kills off the ScotRail lady, you know we're all in trouble

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

Then, one Saturday afternoon, when my wife was out, and I was alone, I picked up my phone like some dirty little pervert and downloaded an AI app.
I told it my name and that I wrote books and asked if it had read them. 'Yes", the creature replied.
Two points: first, I call AI a "creature" as it inhabits that "uncanny valley" between human and automaton which today elicits what's called "the ick". Second, the bugger was reading my books without paying me.
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I asked if it had any ideas which might make a good subject for my next book. It spewed out weird amalgams of what I've already written. One suggestion was: write about an Iraq war veteran who returns to Northern Ireland, becomes a werewolf, and goes on a killing spree.
My first book was a non-fiction account of my coverage of the intelligence war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
My second book was a novel exploring the theme of "nature versus nurture" through a story about two children in Northern Ireland during the Troubles who drift into acts of senseless violence.
My third book was also a novel, based on the true story of a serial murderer apprehended in 16th century Germany who was put on trial as a werewolf because the authorities had no understanding back then of psychopathy, so assumed the crimes were supernatural.
This AI brute was a mere plagiarist – and a rubbish one at that. I felt slightly disgusted at how pathetic it was – the same sort of feeling I get when Donald Trump tries to talk about actual government policy.
AI isn't some god-like intelligence, it's simply the dumb kid copying your class-work in school.
I felt like the creature had carved lumps out of me, reduced me down to some stereotype, metaphorically lopped off my arms and legs like the Black Night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and left me as a half-made caricature of myself.
And isn't that precisely what AI does artistically? Look at all that AI slop out there online, drawings and video clips that are simply stereotype after stereotype, a regurgitation of human creativity, mediated through dead digital circuits, which emerges as derivative junk.
It's like taking a Picasso, shredding it, feeding the pieces into a machine and then watching the machine puke out "Live, love, laugh" paintings.
Is this the thing that's going to replace us? If we're dumb enough to believe that a device this talentless can supersede human creativity then we should just climb into our collective grave now and pull the mud over ourselves as a species.
But this creature is replacing us. We are that dumb. Fletcher Mathers, the Scottish actress who voiced ScotRail announcements for 20 years, has just been unceremoniously binned for an AI version.
To make matters worse, another actress, Gayanne Potter, has accused ScotRail of using her voice to "train" the replacement AI without consent.
When AI kills off the ScotRail lady, you know we're all in trouble.
Is this what we want? A world where we disappear and computers pretend to be us? I hate the very thought of that dead, sterile world.
I get a visceral reaction now to AI in film or TV. If I see some street scene rendered in AI slop, bang goes the off button.
The Oscar-winning movie The Brutalist shouldn't have received any awards. It used AI to make the lead actor, Adrian Brody, sound authentically Hungarian. I want actors to act, not be auto-tuned ventriloquist's dummies.
I was looking around the dinner table last night at my family and a shiver went through me for some of their futures under AI.
Writer, teacher, police officer, taxman, designer, lawyer. Who's for the chop first? I worry most about the taxman and designer.
Keir Starmer has nothing left to offer but some suicidal rush towards an AI-state. Goodbye taxman.
Private industry doesn't care if it chucks talent on the scrapheap to jack shareholder dividends. Goodbye designer.
If AI was used to enhance humanity, rather than reduce us, I'd embrace it. I've been a technophile my entire life. But from the mid-2010s that love affair turned to technophobia as I saw what social media was doing to us as a species. Now, I'm almost a full Luddite.
AI should be used to help doctors perfect cancer diagnoses, town planners eliminate traffic jams, and engineers make energy-efficient buildings to lower bills.
Instead, AI is either used to create cultural crap – mountains of manure – or it exacerbates humanity's faults.
'AI is either used to create cultural crap – mountains of manure – or it exacerbates humanity's faults' (Image: PA) Use AI to sift job applications and you'll tend to find the CVs which rise to the top are from white guys. Why? Because earlier successful candidates were white men. AI reinforces our prejudices, as it simply studies those prejudices and repeats them.
The same happens with AI and probation decisions. Most white prisoners go free, whilst black prisoners stay incarcerated. Why? Because the AI is simply repeating the bias it learned from all the previous decisions.
The horror is: there's no going back. This thing is on the loose and it's in the hands of the maniacs who broke the world already with social media. It won't be the force for good it could be, its destiny is fixed as a force for evil.
AI should be used as an obedient assistant which sits beside humanity, helping us make better decisions for ourselves and others.
Instead, we're Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The broom is alive, yet it has no soul, no empathy, no mind, so it doesn't care if it destroys the world – and all at our cursed bidding.
Incidentally, I deleted the AI off my phone forever.
Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer at Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.