Last night’s Dispatches was called Will AI Take My Job? Usually when something like this employs a question mark in the title, it’s because the answer is no. Not this time, though, because the sheer overwhelming inevitability of AI taking our jobs is genuinely painful to think about.
According to the film, 8m jobs in the UK alone are at risk of being outsourced by AI. Call centre workers, translators, graphic designers – anyone who isn’t a masseur or a scaffolder, basically – will soon be made redundant by a technology that, despite its catastrophic effect on the environment, is growing more sophisticated by the hour. My days are almost certainly numbered; it stands to reason that I will soon be replaced by the ChatGPT prompt “Be performatively exasperated about whatever was just on the telly”. Grok could even whip up a byline photo of an unpleasantly smug egg to go with it. Nobody would be any the wiser.
But if we know AI is going to render us all useless, why would anyone watch Dispatches? Unless they get a perverse kick out of reinforcing all their darkest beliefs about the future of humanity, surely there was very little to be excited by. But the film anticipated this, and reacted with a cute little rug-pull of its own. The episode was presented by a journalist called Aisha Gaban. But, get this, she was AI all along.
That’s right, Channel 4 just Tilly Norwooded itself. There was not a single human thing about Gaban. She was an entirely computer generated presence. But despite being a bundle of pixels and code, she was a fairly convincing host. Sure, she was dead behind the eyes, and her mouth couldn’t animate sibilance very well, but she looked more or less human and nailed the stilted cadence of the television documentarian. What a lark. That person you trusted as a figure of authority? Not even a person! Joke’s on you, fleshbag.
The meat of the show itself was diverting enough, taking four professionals – a doctor, a lawyer, a musician and a photographer – and pitting them against the best that AI can offer. The thrust of the results seemed to be that while humans are better, AI is quicker and cheaper. And, given that avarice is the motivating factor for every industry, this means that we are all royally screwed.
Admittedly, some of the technology made sense. A tool that can diagnose patients in half the time of a traditional GP, for example, has the potential to support human medics who are already buckling under the strain of a broken system. But who the hell needs an AI photographer? Surely the point of AI is to remove drudgery from our lives, not automate creativity. The existence of AI photographers points to a horrifying future where we’re all doomed to work in full service of machines that puke out crap art for ever.
But anyway, this was all a sideshow to Aisha Gaban, apparently Britain’s first AI television host. And honestly, it was hard to see her as anything but Channel 4’s attempt to have its cake and eat it. Not only did it get to show off its swanky new toy, but it also got to tut-tut at the technology that created her. What an ingenious trick.
It was even harder to see the film as anything other than a stark warning to all the other Channel 4 presenters. Hey Krishnan Guru-Murthy, you’d better not complain about office snacks in the future, or you’ll be sacked in favour of a blinking mannequin we’ve programmed to read an Autocue. And no contract disputes from you, Kevin McCloud, because we can replace you with a virtual avatar that can frown at terrazzo worktops without ever needing a loo break.
And that’s without mentioning the environmental cost of it all. It would have been nice if Dispatches had Gaban end the show by detailing exactly how much water was used to run the datacentre that created her, especially given Channel 4’s longstanding commitment to achieving net zero.
All in all, it made for a dizzyingly grim watch on multiple levels. And given the speed with which AI is improving, this will only get worse. Three years from now you’ll be getting ChatGPT to give you a bullet-pointed precis of an AI-generated criticism of a show that was presented by AI-generated hosts, while you dig in the dirt for worms to feed your family. Still, it was nice while it lasted, wasn’t it?
