Reality, reporting, and artificial intelligence: it’s the news from Britain

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If you follow nothing but the US news, you can be forgiven for thinking that reality’s out of fashion these days, but the British press, for all its faults, is still struggling to keep the real world in at least soft focus. So it was an embarrassment when the Times interviewed Bill de Blasio about Zohran Mamdani and–

Wait, though: Bill de Who? Blasio. The former mayor of New York. About the man who at the time was about to be elected the new mayor of New York and now has been. Only it turned out that the reporter wasn’t interviewing Bill de Blasio the former mayor but Bill DeBlasio a wine importer from Long Island.

Bill de Wine Merchant said some highly critical things about Mamdani. Bill de Mayor supported Mamdani and was furious to see his position misrepresented in the Times.

What happened? The reporter goofed. It’s a mistake anyone could make and we can all be grateful no one handed this guy the nuclear codes instead of what should’ve been a simple assignment.

Irrelevant photo: gladiolus, blooming out of season

As the wine importer explained it,  he hadn’t impersonated de Blasio.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio. . . . I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”

On the topic of how their names are spelled, Wine DeBlasio said, “Low-class Italians use a little d.” 

If we have to take sides, I’m guessing we know who we like.

Wine DeBlasio had been getting low-class de Blasio’s email for years, which he described as a decade of getting “brutal, vicious hate mail.” When security guards at a baseball game offered to introduce him to “the real Bill de Blasio,” the mayor de Blasio asked, “How bad is it having the same last name as me?” 

“Dude, you’re killing me,” Wine DeBlasio said.

With this, I guess, he got his own back.

 

Sexism and magic tricks 

Back in the dark days of 1991, the Magic Circle, which is described as an elite society of magicians, had a revelation: it was time to admit women.

I know, but you don’t want to rush into these things. I mean, what if actual women showed up at the meetings and distracted the men or, you know, disrupted things? What if they turned out not to be any good at this magic business–or worse, what if they turned out to be better? 

Anyway, once the society joined the modern world, one member, Raymond Lloyd, revealed that he was, in fact, a she and had become a magician only so she could–

Okay, the newspaper article I’m working with says “infiltrate” the society. I’d say “fuck with it.” Either way, it wasn’t a simple task. Lloyd was already working as an assistant to the magician Jenny Winstanley, who was sick to the teeth of the boys-only policy but was too recognizable to fool them herself. 

So Winstanley and Lloyd hatched a plot and Lloyd spent the next two years not only learning magic tricks but creating the character of Raymond, a young-looking 18-year-old. In the photo that goes with the article, Raymond looks like a young 14-year-old, and a short one, but nobody thought to question  either his age or sex. Lloyd wore a wig, a body suit, gloves (her hands, she thought, would be a giveaway), and a bit of facial fluff. He spoke in a croaky voice. Or maybe she did. It’s complicated. Why don’t we have have non-gendered pronouns? The Finnish don’t and they’ve reproduced successfully for a long time now. 

The gloves made sleight-of-hand tricks particularly difficult, but the real trick was convincing the men sitting in judgement on her act that they were looking at a very young man. But you know how it is. Magic is built on keeping people from noticing what you don’t want them to notice. They saw only what they expected to see. 

Lloyd was accepted as a member and when the society voted to accept women she and Winstanley went public about their best trick ever. 

And what happened? The Circle threw Lloyd out. 

She worked as a magician for another ten years before packing it in and moving to Spain. Winstanley died in a car crash in 2004. Then in early 2025, the Circle voted Lloyd back in and went on a hunt to let her know. She was, she said, inclined to pass up the honor–she hadn’t worked as a magician in years–but decided to accept it in Winstanley’s honor. 

The Circle is still 95% male but women no longer have to disguise themselves as 14-year-old boys to join. 

Who says the world isn’t making progress?

 

And from the world of artificial intelligence …

. . . comes just what you’ve been waiting for: deathbots. These are not bots that kill you–those are called drones, or sometimes self-driving cars–but programs that record the voices, speech patterns, and personalities of the dead, toss them in an electronic blender, bake at 350 F, and present them to the living so they can have a nice long chat with someone they miss.

I know. Bring an umbrella, friends, ‘cause it’s getting weird out there.

A project called Synthetic Pasts did some research on how this was working, using themselves, they said, as “our own test subjects. We uploaded our own videos, messages and voice notes, creating ‘digital doubles’ of ourselves.

“In some cases, we played the role of users preparing our own synthetic afterlives. In others, we acted as the bereaved trying to talk to a digital version of someone who has passed away.”

What did they learn?

The least creepy versions–that’s my judgement but I don’t think it’s too far off theirs–are basically archives, sorting the prospective dead person’s recorded memories (recorded while they’re still alive, in case that needs saying) into browsable categories. From there, though, it gets weirder.

Another version hosts a kind of electronic seance, prompting the prospective corpse to record memories so it can spit out its own version, complete with emojis, and not always emojis that match the emo.

How well does the bot handle the emotions this may call up in the living recipient those memories? 

Ummm. Yeah. Example:

Human: You were always so encouraging and supportive. I miss you.

Deathbot: I’m right here for you, always ready to offer encouragement and support whenever you need it. And I miss you too… Let’s take on today together, with positivity and strength.

So basically, a prefabricated motivational message. You could find the same thing in the greeting card department of your nearest stationery store.  If any are left where you live. And if one is, you might ask it to record its memories so we won’t have to mourn it when it closes.

As the experimenters point out, this is a business, complete with subscription fees and platforms that harvest users’ data–emotional and biometric–to keep engagement high. Loss, grief, and remembrance? Hell yes, let’s monetize ’em all. I’m sure Marx would’ve had something interesting to say about that if in his most irresponsible fever dreams he could’ve imagined such a thing.

The systems promise, eventually, to digitally resurrect the dead–their gestures, voices, personalities. If that becomes possible, the experimenters say it will change the experience of remembering, “smoothing away the ambiguity and contradiction. . . . 

“Our study suggests that while you can talk to the dead with AI, what you hear back reveals more about the technologies and platforms that profit from memory – and about ourselves – than about the ghosts they claim we can talk to.”

*

But AI isn’t just talking for the dead. For a small fee it’s available to speak for the living and to the government. 

Britain has a system called planning permission, which limits what can be built where. Or at least it’s intended to. It’s complicated and everyone hates it (yes, I have checked with everyone and every last woman, man, and magician agrees) but it’s also kept the country from turning into the sprawling mess that re the suburbs of Chicago. 

How does it work? Let’s say your neighbors want to turn their attic into an extra bedroom, which involves a slightly higher roof and a few windows. Or wants to add a multi-level parking ramp. Or turn the garage into a nightclub. Or a developer wants to build 700 new houses on a nearby field. The proposal can be perfectly rational or completely insane. You know what humans are like. You and your neighbors will be informed about it and have a chance to object. 

Objecting takes a bit of commitment, though. You have to take one word and staple it to another word, then tape both to a thought that’s at least marginally related to your objection. And your objection has to be related to the planning regulations, because “I don’t like it” won’t get you past the gatekeepers of modern British living.

So you need to understand the planning regulations,  at least a bit, which–

Would it be fair to say no one does? Probably not, but it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration. The article I’m stealing my information from calls the regulations labyrinthine. 

And here’s where we find not one but two AI services that offer to take your objection, dig out some backing from the planning regs, and turn it into a rational-sounding letter, complete with references to previous cases and decisions that–you know what AI is like–might never have been decided by any governmental body on this planet.

What will this do to the planning system? According to a lawyer who specializes in planning law, bring it to a grinding halt. The decisions are made by elected officials–sometimes very local ones–who know a little more about planning than I do about chemistry but not necessarily. 

“The danger,” the lawyer said, “is decisions are made on the wrong basis. Elected members making final decisions could easily believe AI-generated planning speeches . . . even if they are full of made-up case law and regulations.” 

Someone who campaigns for more homes to be built with community support said, “This will . . . lead to people finding obscure reasons” to object to planning applications. 

Meanwhile, the government is promoting AI as a way to clear the planning backlog and build 1.5 million homes by 2029.

***

I can’t blame artificial intelligence for my most recent fuckup, just a lapse in human intelligence. It was Fraggle who pointed out (thanks, Fraggle) that I posted a headline, midweek instead of Friday, with no content, in spite of which it got two likes. I may be at my most popular when I don’t say anything. 

Where was the content? she asked. In a dusty shoebox at the back of the closet, whence I have rescued it and poured it here, where it belongs. 

What happened? I hit Post when I should’ve hit Schedule. 

It’s been that kind of week. That’s the lovely thing about publishing: when you make a fool of yourself, you do it in public. Stick around to see what happens next. I’ll be as surprised as you.

37 thoughts on “Reality, reporting, and artificial intelligence: it’s the news from Britain”

  1. Pingback: Reality, reporting, and artificial intelligence: it’s the news from Britain

  2. Good morning, Ellen.
    I’ve read a few things about the AI “resurrection” idea, mostly about celebrities who have been exploited by … I don’t know what to call them. Anyway, people whose sensitivity is so far below normal that it might as well not exist.
    Some years ago, we lost our only child, suddenly, to an undiagnosed illness. No-one’s fault, just the result of being alive and susceptible. I find a little comfort in seeing her in photos but my husband finds it deeply upsetting, so I keep them in my own little workroom so he doesn’t have to see them. We love and miss her equally, every day, but we deal with it differently. We would sacrifice anything to have her back, as would her husband, but even the idea of an AI projection nauseates me. There are any number of arguments and beliefs about what makes us human, whether we have souls etc but I loathe the idea that we can be “cloned”, to any degree by an artefact with no actual feelings. Our daughter was loving, kind, clever and hardworking (I would say that, I suppose). She was precious to us and, above all, irreplaceable. So I won’t be subscribing to the service.
    Hope this isn’t too downbeat for a wet Friday, thanks for your thoughts, as ever,
    Jeannie

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    • I can’t imagine how hard it must be to pick yourself up and go on after a loss like that, but I do know that what I miss about the people I’ve lost is them. Not some imitation of them. I often wish I could tell my mother about something–to laugh about it, or because it would please her, or because I’d love to know what she’d say. But you can’t get that from even the best imitation of a person. It’s her I’d want to talk to, not some set of memories and voice patterns that’ve been through a blender and then baked. And that was by no means too downbeat. It was moving. Very different beasts.

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      • After my brother died my mother didn’t even want to hear live recordings of his voice. Anyone trying to sell synthesized recordings would have been shown the rough side of the door!

        PK

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      • I hope this doesn’t come over the wrong way, Ellen, but your response is one of the best I’ve experienced. Few people (fortunately, maybe) know how to react to another’s loss.
        I agree absolutely about missing them and not an imitation. We can’t know even those closest to us completely. I didn’t see directly the Helen who was a biochemical engineer, or her work in medical research, or a member of the audience at a Foo Fighters concert. I knew of these parts of her life but they were separate from my interaction with her. Any fake made up from memories would never grow, never be influenced by experiences which I couldn’t be part of.
        As for picking ourselves up, you keep moving forward because there’s really no other choice, unless you give up altogether. It’s hard but the only consolation, if you can call it that, is that there are worse ways to lose a beloved daughter than to sudden catastrophic illness (and it’s commoner than you might think). How we would have coped with worse, I don’t know…
        Jeannie

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  4. I have been quiet lately just observing the progress of AI and finishing up final edits on my futuristic novel about a musician working on a space cruise ship in 2120 called “The Love Boat 2120”. It is full of futuristic predictions!

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  5. So preoccupied with writing, picky as hell about reading. But, always stay up on this blog. Irreverently insightful. Ms. Hawley, your pen never lets a reader down.

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  6. You’d think it’d be obvious…if people own property and pay taxes on it, the PLAN should be to treat it as PRIVATE PROPERTY, where the owner can do what the owner likes unless neighbors can show that it’s materially harmful to them. (Planting bermudagrass: probably allowable. Mowing with a motorized device that burns gasoline in an unfiltered engine: debatable. Putting atrazine on grass: if an existing law bans “cruel or unusual punishments” that might be construed to require that male property owners be sterilized by doctors in hospitals rather than by indignant neighbors…)

    Pris cilla King

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    • Defining what materially harms the neighbors will have everyone in court a lot of the time. The planning system here, for all its problems, is, I think, a step ahead of the American what-the-hell,let-’em-build system.

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  7. Reminiscent of the big Rudy Giuiani stolen election presser at The Four Seasons…which was not the fashionable restaurant but a suburban landscaping business ( Not trying to overdo, but not sure how much a European audience would know or give a flying flip about what I’m referring to)

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  8. Your piece skewers the absurdities with terrific wit, but behind the jokes sits a brutal truth: artificial intelligence is not some quirky sideshow, it is the latest way to turn human frailty into a revenue stream.

    Those deathbots are not just unsettling, they are a market plan: grief rebranded as a subscription service, bereavement repackaged as “engagement”. Synthetic Pasts’ experiment exposes the hollowness – a bland motivational script where a loved one’s contradictions should be – yet the business model depends on people at their most vulnerable mistaking this for solace. In a country where mental health provision is rationed and counselling waiting lists stretch into years, the idea that tech firms will step in as cut price pseudo therapists is not merely creepy, it is an indictment of political choices.

    Your account of AI generated planning objections shows the same pattern: technology deployed not to solve the housing crisis, but to arm the already articulate and litigious with new weapons to block homes. Developers and well heeled objectors will harness clever tools and fabricated case law, while young renters and overcrowded families are left battling a “labyrinthine” system with nothing but form letters and despair. A government that trumpets AI as the magic key to 1.5 million homes while ducking decisions on social housing, land, and regulation is not modern; it is cowardly.

    Even the Times’s mix up over Bill de Blasio is part of the same story: a media and political class treating reality as optional, accuracy as a dispensable luxury. The Magic Circle finally letting women in while still 95% male is progress of a sort, but it mirrors a broader complacency – as if symbolic tweaks will do while power and profit structures remain untouched. The danger is not that “Al” will learn to saw a lady in half; it is that AI will quietly carve up what is left of our shared public realm while we are invited to marvel at the tricks.

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    • The interesting things about all this–and for “interesting” you could easily substitute “terrifying”–is that AI is as fully out of its creators’ control as it is everyone else’s. Just because they can make money out of it doesn’t mean they know where it’ll take them.

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  9. This “deadbot” thing is in a way shameless. A digitised plastic fetish does nothing but cement one single state in time. I can not imagine how this should be helpful for the part surviving.
    The human memory works, changes, in the end helps. One of the most important characteristics of us humans, what makes bearable to be human, is forgetting.
    This “deadbot” – what a nice name – is made simply because it is possible, just another silicon crudity. Just do not confuse yer sexbod with the deadbod.
    How works a cerebrum that comes up with such crap ?

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    • Because it’s possible, because it just might make money, because someone read too many science fiction stories (or TV shows) when they were young–bad ones. Mostly because it might make money, although I can’t imagine how. Shameless, yes.

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  12. Elon Musk’s AI is trashing Trump’s economic decisions fairly regularly. Someone must have fed it some fake news. I like the way humans forget “garbage in, garbage out” every time we get a new technology breakthrough

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