Thought social media was awful already? Then gird yourself for the next evolution of fake friendships, as brands aim to make you actually like them
Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He was recently disturbed to find that ChatGPT has better musical taste than many of his friends. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk
Man told to kill the Queen by his AI girlfriend!” History may some day recognise that as the most perfectly formed tabloid headline ever, but right now it’s merely a symptom. To put it another way, it’s an answer to the question “what do you get if you cross a moral panic with a feeding frenzy?”
I have to admit I hesitated before embarking on yet another column on AI, as I’ve been covering it for over 40 years, right from the days of Lisp, Eliza and “expert systems”, up to creating pictures of yucky seafood dishes with Stable Diffusion. A couple of events forced my hand, though, convincing me that evading the topic isn’t an option this month.
The first of those events was the 2023 CogX Festival. I first covered this event in 2019 when it was held near where I live, at the newly opened King’s Cross Granary Square site. Around 10,000 people attended some 500+ sessions given by leading AI techies from the UK and USA. The audience was overwhelmingly 20-somethings wearing backpacks and plaid shirts, and either already working as AI developers or wanting to. I was given a press pass and heard revelatory talks about deep-learning convolutions and IPU (intelligence processing unit) architectures.
During Covid, CogX continued via Zoom and was inevitably far less exciting, but I still “attended” a dozen sessions. CogX 2023 moved to the 02 stadium and attended by around 90,000, hearing over 1,000 speakers on ten stages, including celebrities such as Stephen Fry and the Queen of Jordan. I didn’t even bother applying for a press pass, and the ticketing structure was quite Byzantine – you could get a free pass to get in, but then had to purchase “add-ons” to actually hear anything, which could range from £500 to over £1,000. I guess that’s because the emphasis is now on attracting investors rather than plaid shirts: AI has arrived so applications and commercialisation now take precedence over research and development.
The other significant event took place at home where among several old friends we had to dinner were a director of an important science picture library (let’s call them R in Kafkaesque style) and a professional photographer (J) for a la
