The tech gods arrive
As our new broverlords ascend to the presidential dais, it's up to us now
And so it begins…
Tomorrow will see the inauguration of President Trump. And this time around, there’s one crucial difference. His tech bro allies will be front and centre: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos. NBC has reported they will be on the platform. This is the image that is going to be seared into our eyeballs and that sets the tone and the expectation for the next four years.
The ascension of the tech gods to the presidential dais is a remarkable journey. Back in December 2016, I watched live on C-Span as Trump welcomed a group of tech execs into a conference room in Trump Tower. Front and centre was Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, who’d been one of the few people in Silicon Valley to back Trump. And at that meeting, Trump stroked his hand throughout but the rest of the execs looked nervous, unsure. Some of them such as Sheryl Sandberg had been vocal Democrat supporters. But they all said how excited they were to be there and - Bezos’s word - “super-excited about the possibilities for innovations in this space”.
I just checked to see what I wrote that Sunday. There’s a rule in journalism that if the headline is question, the answer is generally no. But eight years on, it’s now clear: the answer is yes, yes, yes.
This week Joe Biden’s last major speech sounded the alarm to a middle America which had not heard such words before. America, he said, was becoming a “tech industrial complex”.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom."
If you’re subscribing to this newsletter none of this is going to be news to you but given reports Google searches for the word “oligarchy” spiked immediately afterwards, it is presumably to a swathe of America that’s never had to reckon with these ideas and issues before.
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, is also among the execs who are expected to kiss the ring tomorrow. Back in 2016, it was Google that I was focussed on. Google was prompting users to search for results on whether the holocaust really happened and when they did, they were being sent straight to Stormfront, a Nazi website.
Google responded not by fixing or even acknowledging the problem, instead the head of public affairs for Europe repeatedly rang my editor and complained. Google had recently spent a lot of money with the Guardian on a sponsored virtual reality project and the head of public affairs for the company felt entitled to make his views known. Weeks of low-grade aggression culminated in a nuclear letter that landed on Christmas Eve. I dealt with in a sweat in a service station on the M4 with the Guardian’s head of legal affairs while she prepared her goose for the oven.
I often think about that story, which was the beginning of the trail that took me down the Cambridge Analytica rabbithole and what I learned from it about dealing with big tech. It was the first time I’d been threatened in this way but after the initial fear and panic - the Google exec cc-ed every senior editor on the paper - the Guardian’s managing editor was robust and reassuring: “If there’s anything that needs to be amended, we will amend it,” she said. “And then we will tell him to fuck off.”
The robots are already here
At the beginning of January, I wrote a post about how I’d asked ChatGPT to explain the risks of the Guardian’s sale of the Observer and it enumerated the many ways that that the Guardian could be harmed both editorially and financially. This a deal so dumb, I wrote, that even ChatGPT has its number. I whacked this headline on the post and sent it out.
Less than three weeks later, and it turns out that my silly prank prefigured something much darker.
This week at a union meeting of the Guardian and Observer chapels, we found out during the four days of our historic strike in December, the Guardian’s management deployed AI to replace the journalists out on the picket line. Senior managers used an AI tool, based on ChatGPT, to suggest headlines for articles.
There was complete shock at the meeting: not even Rupert Murdoch has used robots to break a strike. The Telegraph has written up the story here pointing out that it’s in breach of the Guardian’s own editorial code and there’s a full response from the Guardian about how it was “a limited trial”.
One of the key demands of journalists through the strike has been for governance reform. The true stakeholders of the organisation - the journalists and its readers have no voice whatsoever on the Guardian’s GMG board and only one sole journalist on the ultimate owner, the Scott Trust board.
The day after the news of the AI strikebreakers, there came news that a new board member had been appointed. Not a journalist, it turned out, but the man who’d just stepped down as President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Google, Matt Brittin. The chair of the GMG board wrote: “Matt’s technology and commercial expertise, including the nature of the risks and transformative opportunities of AI, will be hugely beneficial as we navigate through this rapidly evolving environment.”
Corporate boards are there to provide governance: to hold executives feet to the fire and ask tough questions. It’s why two years ago, another GMG director resigned because of what he considered governance irregularities.
Among those congratulating Brittin on his appointment was the Guardian’s CEO who’d previously worked with him at Google.
There’s no doubt that the Guardian is eyeing up AI and will be about to make some big decisions, both on if and how to deploy it and whether to strike deals with developers. The New York Times is among a number of publishers and authors who are suing OpenAI for stealing its data without permission. (Follow my friend @jasonkint on Twitter who posts incredible snippets from the legal documents in all major tech trials. This week he posted internal Facebook emails that showed engineers used a notorious library of pirated books to train their AI.)
Other publishers are doing licensing deals with big tech, and the Guardian’s CEO has already suggested this is the route that it intends to take. There are those who say that this is the financially pragmatic path: that AI is happening, it’s impossible to resist and publishers may as well make some money from it and learning from the guys on the other side of the industry is the smart thing to do. I do understand the logic to it. Similarly, in Kazakhstan, women often end up marrying the rapists who kidnap them.
I was pondering this when I wondered if the Guardian’s data is in the OpenAI set that was used to break our strike? Although only a handful of journalists worked during the strike, the newspaper was published and the website was kept replenished. Were articles written by Guardian journalists stolen by OpenAI to make the tool that Guardian management then used to replace the labour of striking Guardian journalists?
OpenAI refuses to say what is and isn’t in its data set. But I had an idea. I went to ChatGPT and wrote the following prompt:
You can make your own mind up on how plausible you think that looks. AI-Carole Cadwalladr goes on:
There’s a phrase for an emotion humans experience on seeing humanoid robots: the uncanny valley. It’s the feeling of unease or disgust you get when you see something that appears almost human but not quite. And it’s what I got reading this sentence: “They were standing for the principle that truth matters, that stories matter, that people matter.” That is pretty much exactly what I would say in a way that I would say it. The article, I’d like to think, is a dumb vanilla robot’s approximation of my work. But that sentence, in isolation, feels pretty bang on.
And, now, I learn that as my colleagues and I lawfully withheld our labour during four days of strike, my previous labour for the company stolen from the Guardian’s site was then used by the Guardian’s management to replace my colleagues’ and my labour.
Our dystopian future is coming far faster than we think. And if you think that your job is safe, think again. It’s why labour rights are absolutely critical in the coming fight against big tech. And why, I found my experience organising with my colleagues over the last months so instructive. We are all going to need to understand what rights we have and how to assert them. Or we lose them. And not just labour rights, but our civil and human ones too.
That is why the announcement from the UK government this week was so profoundly alarming. This is a Labour government that has taken the advice of a venture capitalist with a vast list of investments in tech companies and announcedthis week that it would seek to end “the current uncertainty around intellectual property [which] is hindering innovation and undermining our broader ambitions for AI.”
The policy announcement from Keir Starmer is one of the most naive and craven statements that I’ve seen from any prime minister/head of state on AI. Read John Naughton on the many problems with it here. That a Labour government would give carte blanche to big tech to data harvest and destroy the UK’s thriving creative industries and thousands of jobs is just one of the huge pitfalls of such an approach.
It’s why a clear firewall between government and big tech is vital. That has collapsed in the US and it’s why it’s now more important than ever in the UK and Europe. But we also need a firewall between journalism and big tech. We are not friends. We are not allies. And former unrepentant executives should have no place on our boards. Google never answered my questions about how the Nazis gamed their search engine. They had to eventually rebuild the entire search algorithm to stop it.
We have to resist or fall. It’s why I liked another column in today’s Observer New Review by Stewart Lee. “Realistically, we should now be imposing the same boycotts on Musk’s hideous fascist US that we once did on apartheid South Africa,” he said. He’s right. That is the model.
It’s on us to take action now. It’s why Hollywood writers and actors went on strike because they understand exactly the risk that this technology poses. And it’s why the appointment of a Google exec to the Guardian board is not just “tone-deaf” to quote my illegally-constructed AI self, it’s dangerous. This is a company that has done more to destroy UK and US journalism than almost any other all while seeking to minimise tax liabilities and evade accountability to parliament.
It’s the sub-editors’ job to write headlines. For how much longer?
Sergei in the news
Thank you to my editors at Observer New Review for this fabulous treatment for the story I wrote in this week’s paper about the man behind our podcast, Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring.
Sergei is such a character, a Russian-born Conservative party activist, who tried to blow the lid off a Kremlin influence operation only to be ignored by the UK authorities. This is the end of the piece and a classic piece of Sergei storytelling:
A warning to America
I posted in the week about an online event with Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize, Rana Ayyub, an incredible Indian investigative journalist and Asif Kapadia, the director of the techno-dystopian new film, 2073. We discussed what’s coming down the line in America and what and how people can do.
There’s a write-up of it here and a link to a YouTube recording of it. Please do sign up to the email list if you’d like to learn more about how you can protect you and your family and stand up to Silicon Valley.
Finally, a tiny bit of positive news. There are people doing this: walking the walk. I was impressed by this. A lawyer representing Facebook in the big copyright case being brought by Sarah Silverman that I wrote about above posted this on Linkedin announcing he’d fired Meta as a client.
There are things that we can do. We have agency. We’re all going to have to take hard decisions in the coming years. And, it’s like the managing editor told me all those years ago, when it comes to these companies, we will do what we have to do. And then we can - and should - tell them to fuck off.
Hi Carole, thank you for your inspirational bravery throughout all this madness. After trump won I signed back up to the Guardian Weekly in an effort to support independent journalism, however the more you tell us about GMG and the Scott Trust the more I feel I am backing the wrong side. What do you think, should I/we switch my/our allegiance from the Guardian? And more broadly are you and your colleagues considering leaving to set up your own media outlet which is run by journalists rather than corporate shills?
Until Americans understand that there is nothing these fascist misfit dweebs have that we need, we’re sunk. They’ve made billions on NOTHING that’s worth any value. None of it is actually necessary. Sometimes it’s been fun, but how about now? Now they’re beating us to death with wads of our own cash. It’s time for people to wake up, but I don’t have much faith in Americans anymore. My only hope, ironically, is that the MAGA loyal voters finally see they’ve been duped.