Tag Archives: AI

rrakku

Who is Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue: AI art and Neo-Fascism

By rrakku | Mon 14th April 2025 - 1:51 pm

For being such keen environmentalists and anti-fascists, the Lib Dems need to be far more critical of generative AI than we currently are. But as opposed to talking about the obvious and well-known environmental damage that AI causes, I’d like to focus on the much less talked about the latter: AI art as the contemporary fascist aesthetic.

This should be glaringly apparent if we just take a short look at the people who are pro-AI art: from Trump and his administration using Ghibli-style AI images to publicise their illegal and inhumane deportations, to Elon Musk generating a drawing of …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 4 Comments
John Grout

We need to talk about the government’s AI plans

By John Grout | Wed 12th February 2025 - 8:46 am

If you asked someone a few years ago which party formed a British government wanting to exempt AI firms from having to adhere to copyright laws  and joining the Trump government in refusing to sign an international declaration calling on AI to be, among other things, ethical, they would almost certainly have assumed it was a Conservative government, not a Labour one.

The reality is that that’s exactly what Keir Starmer’s Labour government is doing.

Both of these should be extremely concerning for us all, but for Liberal Democrats this should ring particular alarm bells.  The government seems intent to hand the majority of the value of the UK’s vital creative industries, estimated to be worth over £120 billion, to unaccountable US tech firms headed by the wealthiest men on the planet, with precious few safeguards for authors, artists, and creators.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 16 Comments
Les Tarr

Does AI really pose a risk to democracy?

By Les Tarr | Wed 3rd July 2024 - 9:46 am

On Thursday the 27th of June, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme broadcast an episode called ‘Can AI Steal Your Vote?’

The premise was that 12 undecided households were told they were going to see some social media content that parties had been working on but had not released yet. First hook being they would be told something that others did not know, instant buy-in for most people.

What they were not told was that this was an experiment to see how people could be manipulated to vote in specific way based on information they were presented with. Any experimental social scientists might question …

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Posted in Op-eds | 1 Comment
Tom Arms

Observations of an expat: AI and international politics

By Tom Arms | Sat 3rd June 2023 - 10:44 am

Dependent on whom you listen to, AI is either going to save or destroy humanity.

In common with most leaps in human knowledge, the reality lies somewhere in the middle. Winners and losers are guaranteed.

Technology will race blindly ahead with society attempting to play catch-up and unable to do so because of its inability to know the unknown.

The one known is that the AI genii is well and truly out of the bottle and won’t/can’t be stuffed back in. The trick therefore is how to regulate it in order to maximise the upside and minimise the downside.

One of the most pressing AI-related needs is for an agreed international framework. The technology has the potential to impact military capabilities to such a degree that it could dwarf the significance of nuclear weapons. A nationalist-driven AI-race is bad. Unfortunately it has already started.

Britain’s post-Brexit economy is declining and the government sees AI as an opportunity to harness the country’s small but effective high-tech industry to reverse the trend. It has issued a White Paper which emphasises a Wild West approach to Artificial Intelligence in a bid to become an AI super power. It will avoid “heavy-handed legislation which could stifle innovation” and “take an adaptable approach to regulating AI.”

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Posted in Op-eds | 5 Comments

We can’t ignore AI – we should teach it politics

By Andy Boddington | Tue 7th March 2023 - 11:12 am


Embed from Getty Images

On Monday evening, BBC Radio 4 presented a documentary on ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence star of the moment. The programme was partly written by ChatGPT.

I am a fan of AI. It has the potential to transform our access to information, our understanding, our health services and much more. If it would only get it right.

Whether you like the current generation of AI (services like ChatGPT) or not is like Marmite. More on Marmite below.

ChatGPT is good at national party and international politics. But it can be rubbish at a constituency level. Some answers are like a teenager grabbing random books in the library. Some old. Some newer. Some right. Some wrong. Superficially believable results may be completely wrong because I can’t check the “facts” it gives us.

ChatGPT can make serious errors about recent political events, including by-elections. We need to teach AI to get it right to ensure misinformation does spread.

We can’t walk away from AI. The reality is that it is here to stay. You can no more resist it than some early authors resisted word processors and some ledger clerks resisted computers. But we can make it better.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 15 Comments
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