01-05-2025
AI killed the Easter Bunny
On the grounds of advancing age, I had decided to ignore all the chatter about artificial intelligence and devote my remaining time to things I could properly understand. Then I discovered that one of my own copyrighted properties, the fruit of a year's work, had been scraped into the AI maw without so much as a by-your-leave, and it became personal.
I wrote to my MP who responded with template blandishments. This government… committed to blah blah… exciting prospects… safeguarding… potential opt-out system… a close watch, yadda yadda…
Feeling impotent and no further forward, I returned to my knitting. It took the murder of the Easter Bunny to rouse me from the torpor of denial. My six-year-old grandson, hanging out with friends who knew how to question Google AI, had been informed there is no rabbit who brings chocolate eggs. It's just your parents, dumbo. They buy the eggs from the supermarket and hide them in the garden. In that moment of brutal AI revelation, I fear Father Christmas also received his P45. Likewise the Tooth Fairy. Whether this myth-busting applies to bogeymen and things that go bump in the night, I'm not sure.
I do know, without consulting Google, that the ethics of terrifying today's delicate children are no longer clear. Screen monsters are probably OK but the kind of flesh-and-blood horrors I was threatened with as a child – Flannel Foot the silent burglar, the Man with the Big Stick and, most sinister of all, the Ten O'Clock Horses, who came for you if you were still playing on the street after dark – are now likely considered too horrific for tender ears.
