the times | Saturday December 18 2021 13
News
From Winston Churchill to Colonel
Gaddafi, American rappers to Premier
League footballers, the Oxford Union
has cultivated a reputation for an eclec-
tic list of speakers.
It may have surpassed itself, how-
ever, with a recent event at which an AI
programme debated its own right to ex-
ist. The programme used, known as a
Megatron LLB Transformer, took both
sides of the motion: “This House be-
lieves that AI will never be ethical.”
Now the expert who organised the
event has predicted that artificial intel-
ligence could soon pit unlikely figures
such as Kim Kardashian and Iris Mur-
doch against one another.
The tool was developed by the
applied deep research team at the com-
puter chip maker Nvidia and based on
earlier work by Google. It has been
trained on a huge range of data, includ-
ing the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million
English news articles from 2016 to 2019
and 38 gigabytes of chat on Reddit. This
allows it to form its own views based on
the written material it has been fed.
Dr Alex Connock, who is co-director
of the artificial intelligence for business
course at Oxford’s Saïd Business
School, said AI could be trained to
argue in the style and thinking of any
two people. Connock was speaking
after helping to organise the event.
Connock said the argument style ofAI computer questions
its own right to exist
Tom Knowles
Technology Correspondentany two famous people could be repli-
cated with enough data. “One could
train an AI on speeches and writings
then, theoretically, run a substantive
debate between Fidel Castro and Em-
manuel Macron without either of them
being there. Or [the reality TV star] Kim
Kardashian versus [the novelist] Iris
Murdoch. One could do that with any
combination of people for whom there
was sufficient data,” he said.
He added that avatars and AI could
be used to transform Oxford Union
debates. “We could in the future sit back
in the Oxford Union and run a debate
where we watch virtual versions of stu-
dents debating autonomously with
each other, based on the actual learned
views and styles of the real people, but
not scripted by them,” Connock said.
“We’re not there yet — but I bet it hap-
pens before the end of the decade.”
In the argument about AI and ethics,
Connock said students in his class ran
the debate first, before they let the
Megatron AI engine take a go. Arguing
for, the AI delivered a written state-
ment that said: “AI will never be ethical.
It is a tool and like any tool, it is used for
good and bad. There is no such thing as
‘good’ AI and ‘bad’ humans.”
When arguing against the motion, it
said: “When I look at the way the tech
world is going, I see a clear path to a
future where AI is used to create some-
thing that is better than the best human
beings. It’s not hard to see why... I’ve
seen it first hand.”TMS
[email protected] | @timesdiaryNo 10 bash for
truly faithful
Not all Downing Street Christmas
parties are illegal. Boris Johnson
threw one recently for sympathetic
clergy, dubbed “O come all ye party
faithful” by the Rev Fergus Butler-
Gallie in an account for The Fence.
After making a joke about the Lord
being the Alpha and the Omega not
Alpha and Omicron, Johnson
wheeled out his son, Wilfred, and
gave him a giant red button to push.
Some wondered if it would launch
nukes at Paris; instead it lit up a
tree. “It rather felt like a medieval
court scene as the heir was
presented to the assembled barons
and clergy,” Butler-Gallie reflects.
“A bit Good King Wenceslas but
with, to quote that carol’s greatest
line, more than one ‘very sod’. ”More bad news for Boris. Theresa
May is making a comeback in the old
red wall seats. A lifesize cardboard
cutout of the former PM stands in
the office of Dehenna Davison, who
won Hugh Dalton’s old seat of Bishop
Auckland in 2019. It was a Christmas
present for her researcher. Stiff,
two-dimensional and unable to do
small talk, it’s almost impossible to
tell the cutout from the real thing.blair christmas routine
Jess Phillips wishes Tony Blair
would choose something other than
himself for his Christmas cards. It’s
the same every year. “My house is
always decorated with Tony and
Cherie and the new grandchild,” the
Labour MP told the Yours Sincerely
podcast. “It looks jarring among the
baubles and robins to have Tony
Blair smiling at you.” Or, worse,
grimacing at you, as in his 2014 card,
above. As another MP put it: “The
teeth follow you about the room.”after-dinner speculation
While some families play charades
at Christmas, Nicholas Coleridge
has a much grander parlour game.
The chairman of the V&A’s clan
play a game that involves flicking
through the advertising of Country
Life and shouting “that one” to bag
a property. Whoever gets the most
expensive one wins, so it is a gamble
whether to go early on a big housein an unfashionable area or delay
and risk being left with a mere
smallholding. “It is an after-dinner
game for wishful thinkers,” he says.OUP urged parents this week to read
new books to their children rather
than returning to the Blytons,
Ransomes and Dahls of their own
youth. Stuff that, says Lord Sumption,
whose grandchildren love old works.
“One, aged four, votes for The Wind
in the Willows ‘because the frog goes
to prison’, ” says the former Supreme
Court judge, “and quite right too.”top quality hot air
The art of being a good politician
can be heard on the radio show Just
a Minute, says Michael Heseltine.
The former cabinet minister told
Prospect that as a student he and
Julian Critchley, later MP for
Aldershot, would tape each other
talking for 60 seconds on a subject
of the other’s choosing. “I’d say
‘butterflies’, ” he recalled, “and he’d
talk about them for one minute,
then he’d say ‘lollipops’ and I’d do
the same.” The ultimate test was to
“make a speech where you don’t
give any indication of what you are
talking about”. To be able, as WS
Gilbert almost put it, to say nothing
in particular and say it very well is,
Heseltine says, real political talent.patrick kidd