AI and the Union Jack: the good, the bad and the plain daft.
As Farage declares his mass deportation dream and if MPs are using Chat GPT to write their speeches, should we be worried? An op-ed by Tamara Cincik
A visionary leader can inspire us into acts of bravery or stupidity. A recent drive up the length and breadth of England earlier this week to film in the Lake District (more on that soon), saw numerous motorway bridges festooned with Union Jack and St George flags. Why? Because “Operation Raise the Colours” egged on by uber-Union Jack sock-wearing Nigel Farage MP, have got people painting them on zebra crossings, roundabouts and for some reason festooning motorways with nylon flags.
Farage, moving on from his longstanding Brexit vision for the UK to leave the EU, which according to the Office for Budget Responsibility means “The post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and EU, as set out in the ‘Trade and Cooperation Agreement’ (TCA) that came into effect on 1 January 2021, will reduce long-run productivity by 4% relative to remaining in the EU,’ while “both exports and imports will be around 15% lower in the long run than if the UK had remained in the EU,” has now turned his speech writing rhetoric onto his next policy agenda, and whipped up a frenzy of moral panic about migrants. Ironically, the European Parliament reported in June that, “Irregular migration has also significantly increased since the UK's departure from the EU. Currently, there is no agreement in place between the UK and the EU on the return of asylum applicants. While both the EU and the UK have their own migration and asylum systems, they have cooperated on various aspects of migration in an ad hoc manner. Both parties are eager to enhance cooperation on challenges posed by irregular migration, including combating people smuggling and improving information sharing to better manage migration at their external borders.” Brexit then, is the cause of much of this.
A deeper dive into his Prime Ministerial ambitions shared in an air hangar for “Operation Restoring Justice,’ reveals he would like to remove the Human Rights Act and embark on a mass deportation scheme, forcibly send those seeking asylum back to Afghanistan, where we have no Embassy, and pay the Taliban to take back vulnerable women and children fleeing the most misogynistic regime in recent history. Not only would this be unworkable, but clearly in a week light on news, as the PM is on holiday and parliament is in recess, it has whipped up the commentators, the podcasters and reporters for a full throttle focus on Farage. Precisely what he wanted.
The Farage speech led me to thinking on WW2, and those who fought so we could have human rights, as they bravely fought Nazism and the fascists who wanted to exterminate Jews, gypsies, gays, those with disabilities, and anyone who did not fit their terrifying narrow vision. It transpires that just 8000 who fought in WW2 are still alive in the UK, which I believe explains why Farage’s kind of polarising language can gain currency. If like me you grew up with grandparents who fought in the war, it colours your thinking about the value of human rights.
My grandfather Jack Brooks, was captured in the Battle of Arnhem in 1944 after fighting in door to door combat for five days and outnumbered 3:1. You can watch the sanitised Hollywood version of this Battle, code named Operation Market Garden in the film A Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough. The fact my grandfather and indeed so many who survive wars, live on by chance (his comrade was literally shot dead through the letterbox of a house they were fighting from), never escapes me. I grew up with his tales of being in the army, losing comrades, being a POW and escaping on a bicycle as they were marched eastwards, having dug out the dead at Dresden when the British and US carpet bombed the city. I think even with our intergenerational political and ethical differences, it should be hard for many of us (and Reform are currently leading in the polls), to see a loss of human rights as a cause to get behind. If more of us were listening to WW2 veterans and their stories of sacrifice in the fight against Nazism, I believe they wouldn’t.
Winston Churchill, the PM during WW2, of course was a masterful orator. His speeches inspired and rallied the nation in the face of dire adversity. “We shall fight them on the beaches,” he declared during Dunkirk and “Never give in, never, never, never,” a year later at his former school Harrow, are those of a fine mind, attune to the needs of a nation facing an enemy almost singlehandedly, and written to inspire and entrench a collective resolve to hold firm, fight, be fearless, and win.
An orator can be a visionary leader. I once heard former Prime Minister Gordon Brown deliver an hour long speech (with no notes), on the power of the UK-EU relationship, and was moved to tears by the power of his oratory, which had more than a nod of the missionary minister to its zeal and delivery. This was a very different Brown to the tightlipped PM caught off guard by a microphone after calling Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” in Rochdale during the 2010 General Election campaign. An election he lost.
Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher and Tony Benn were all highly respected political orators of the last century. They all gave speeches which would convey drama, emotion, and move an audience. In 1984, Mrs Thatcher had been working through the night and narrowly missed the 2am bomb that targeted the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where she and many of the Cabinet were staying during their party conference. The next day she gave a remarkable speech to a packed auditorium; not a hair out of place, nor a quiver in her resolution. Iron Lady indeed. I am not saying all good speakers should be immaculate or highly scripted; indeed some of the best speeches have been impromptu and unscripted, but what they should always be, is authentic. If they don’t chime with how your audience feels, or rouse emotion, I cannot see how they are going to change the dial in your direction.
Which is why the usage of Chat GPT by politicians and their SPADs to write speeches, or deliver reports is something I think we all need to worry about. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has been an early adopter of Chat GPT, asking advice on podcasts and policies, dining regularly with Sam Altman the co-founder of Open AI. The Guardian reports, “In July, Kyle signed an agreement with OpenAI to use AI in the UK’s public services. The non-binding deal could give OpenAI access to government data and lead to its software being used in education, defence, security and the justice system.” I am unclear on the ethics of why we would allow a third party access to government data.
Back in February, Meg Pirie from my team at Fashion Roundtable interviewed author and illustrator Chris Haughton, who is campaigning alongside other creatives such as Sir Elton John, on the issue of copyright in light of the government’s Artificial Intelligence Bill. He said: “I was angry. I worked as a volunteer for many years as copyright legal advisor for the AOI, the Association of Illustrators. So although I am not a lawyer, I am actually quite familiar with copyright law. And this, to me, is a very clear violation of it. All the GenAI companies know it is. I assumed they would get shut down once the bigger players like Getty got involved. I did not expect that a Labour Government would side with these copyright violators. But then when I heard that they had gotten funding from big tech it all makes sense.”
This week on X, Politics Home reporter Zoe Crowther tweeted, “Labour MP Mike Reader told me his team play “ChatGPT Bingo” to spot when they think an MP has used it to write their speech. Apparently ChatGPT likes to use phrases like ‘I rise to speak…’ And look! Hansard shows a bit of a spike in the use of that phrase this year.”
On their website they report, “PoliticsHome analysis of Hansard shows that the phrase “I rise to speak…” has been used 601 times across the Commons and the Lords so far this year – compared to only 131 in the first eight months of 2024, and 227 times in the same period in 2023.” Over the last 12 months I have similarly noticed this faux Victorian formality in my inbox, or in writing submissions, which read like Penny Dreadful word soup. Fake facts which do not make sense. Sentences which use 40 words when 10 would do. All chiming in with the “I rise to speak” verbiage, the worst kind of masquerading pretension.
Recent data from UCL shows how worrying this is. In ‘Nature Human Behaviour’, the researchers conducted a series of experiments with over 1,200 study participants who were completing tasks and interacting with AI systems. They “found that people interacting with biased AI systems can then become even more biased themselves, creating a potential snowball effect wherein minute biases in original datasets become amplified by the AI, which increases the biases of the person using the AI.” Co-lead Author Professor Sharot said: “Algorithm developers have a great responsibility in designing AI systems; the influence of AI biases could have profound implications as AI becomes increasingly prevalent in many aspects of our lives.”
In the face of populist hyperbole about national pride, while sales of nylon Union Jack flags Made in China explode, obviously we need an authentic counter narrative. I would suggest we need one with soul. And good data. We need speeches which stir us, we need research which is thoroughly fact checked. At Fashion Roundtable we do this. I insist on it. I can say with authority (and the use of an app which checks if it has been authored by AI) that some of the reports I have been sent, clearly written by Chat GPT are simply regurgitating false information. Or even worse, our own work through a Chat GPT lens.
Fake news facts and bad data mocked up into the latest AI driven analysis is not going to get us anywhere other than into an echo chamber. Equally, we need to not only protect creativity and creatives from robotic copycats who mimic talent. We need to protect against AI bias which further divides us, escalating the roundabout of fake news and clickbait and also celebrate the creativity which drives change and originality.