Artificial Intelligence is Here

A reader sends me an article about AI (not the sauce, that’s A1) and how it’s going to be taking away many of our jobs. AI being Artificial Intelligence. I told him that AI has been writing the editorial at my news-bulletin Business over Tapas for years.

He said, if it wasn’t for the spelling mistakes, he might have believed me.

El Mundo ran a front-page article recently, purporting to show how easy it would be to plant a story with an AI program, using a mock-up picture of two politicians at daggers drawn, actually photographed by a clever paparazzi to be holding hands. One of their examples was Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal, commie and nazi, hugging each other and smiling for the camera.

It’s a fake, right enough, but we are all taken in by a good photo, which of course is well worth a thousand words.

While El Mundo graciously acknowledged that the photos (they had four of them) were bogus, designed by artificial intelligence (under instruction – at least for the time being – of a human operator), it also shows how easy it would be for a less – ah – scrupulous news-source to take things a step further.

And while a tricked-out photo is one thing; how about a fake video, with the victim saying something, with his real voice, that he never really said. Perhaps the President with a declaration that will cause a major international crisis; all at the hands of a fellow hunched over a laptop and wearing a hoodie, or maybe a swastika.

After all, half of us will believe anything we are told.

This is nothing new – Frederick Remington, the famous western artist, drew a few anti-Spanish pictures for his boss the newspaper tsar Randolf Hearst back in 1898, helping to back the US war with Spain over Cuba. Imagine what could be done today.  

In other fields, AI is proving to be a fascinating tool. A black and white portrait of two women won the Sony World Photography Awards a few weeks ago – until the artist, a programmer, fessed up and turned down the prize. No cameras for him.

I was watching a clever little film earlier this week, designed and scripted by AI, of aliens attacking the Earth. It’s called Last Stand. The voice of Joe Biden – why, it sounds real! There’s another video out there called ‘I am not Morgan Freeman’. Well, you sure look and sound like him, Buddy.

And then, there’s AI music. All it needs is a ‘prompt’ – a suggestion of what the programmer is looking for – and away it goes. For example, there’s Freddy Mercury singing ‘Yesterday’ (he recorded it last week). Or how about Donald Trump singing a prison ballad?

A (half-humorous) quote from a Hollywood composer runs ‘It may be a good time for me to switch careers to brick-layer. That is, until they have AI brick-layers’.

Anyway, give it another year or two… when the home computer decides it’s had enough of looking at porn or going on Facebook and suddenly locks the front door and deactivates the cell-phone…

The hep word at present is ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). We read that ‘ChatGPT can’t “think” on its own or offer opinions. It can only respond to incredibly specific directions. Once the user gives it the go-ahead along with some other details, ChatGPT engages in complex problem solving and executes tough tasks, like writing an essay, in seconds...’

Like this one.

Hot, Dry and Maybe Terminal

 With the recent heat wave and the ongoing drought, we are once again fearful of Climate Change – or, to be more exact, Global Warming.

The term “Climate Change” was coined by Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist, who advised the government of George W Bush in 2001 to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around the Earth heating up and drop “Global Warming” for the less scary-sounding “Climate Change”.

One term sounds like a pleasant day on the beach, while the other makes one worry for our children’s future. But the climate isn’t changing – it’s heating, rapidly!

Now, readers in Iceland may take this with a pinch of salt, but here in southern Spain, we’ve just endured a few scorching summer days… at the end of April.

We read that ‘Unusually warm April temperatures engulfed the Iberian Peninsula last week, breaking numerous high-temperature records and setting a new (preliminary) European hottest April day on record (Cordoba Airport reached 38.7°C on April 27th)’.

Of course, it could just be another anomaly, like all the other ones we have experienced in recent years; but there seems to be a likelihood that this summer is going to be long, dry and brutally hot.

"This is not normal. Temperatures are completely out of control this year," Cayetano Torres, a spokesman for Spain's meteorological office, told BBC News, (which prefers to stick to the safer ‘climate change’ terminology). The article also notes the concern over the likelihood of an increase in forest fires here in Spain this season. Last year, a record 310,000 hectares of woodland burned in Spain.

Not that we all believe this stuff. Wiki says that a whopping four out of 69,406 peer-reviewed articles on the subject of global warming published in scientific circles during 2013 and 2014 were from ‘negacionistas’, however ‘The campaign to undermine public confidence in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" organized by industrial, political and ideological interests, and supported by conservative media outlets and sceptical bloggers to fabricate uncertainty about global warming’.

One eccentric American site we found says that ‘nearly four people in every 10 believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes’, which translates as ‘it ain’t our fault, so why cut back on our contaminating industries?’.

Following from the Doñana debacle, a leading Spanish paper asks – is the Partido Popular a climate change denier? Pedro Sánchez evidently believes so.

Some denialists have taken to blaming the meteorologists for the high temperatures this past week – with the AEMET official weather forecasters complaining of endless harassment ("asesinos", "miserables", "os estamos vigilando") from Twitter-feeders and others.

Anyway, it’s now early May, with the summer set to begin on June 21st, to last until… Maybe we should have bought a vacation home in Iceland after all…   

Royal Sails in the Sunset

The Emeritus – that’s to say King Juan Carlos I – was in Spain this weekend, boating in the resort town of Sanxenxo, thirty kilometres from the provincial capital of Pontevedra.

The timing is just before the municipal and some regional elections which are due to commence their inexorable grind towards May 28th. There will be posters.

While there has never been a question asked in any survey of opinion, the case is that many Spaniards would describe themselves as ‘Republicans’ which – unlike the American variety – is something closer to the left than to the right. Here, the Republicans lost the civil war against the Nationalists back in 1939. Following the lengthy rule of the Generalísimo, Spain was finally presented in 1975 with a new head of state: a handsome, modern and personable king – the grandson of Alfonso XIII, who had been dethroned at the onset of La Segunda República back in 1931.

It must be hard being a Royal, expected to set an example to the rest of us; and few of them seem to fulfil the obligation as hoped (and expected). Juan Carlos himself eventually lost his overwhelming popular support following a series of scandals and he was obliged to abdicate to be shortly afterwards all-but-exiled to Abu Dhabi in what might be considered as ‘in disgrace’. 

His son Felipe VI has been most careful to sail a different course and, among his virtues, he steadfastly avoids the company of his sire beyond the coincidence of an occasional royal funeral.

Now we read that the Emeritus is looking to buy a home in the port where he keeps his sailing boat and joining all the scheduled regattas, while maintaining his residence abroad as a tax exile.   

This will not help the royalist cause.

 

The Village Vote

 Insults and discovery on the one side, triumphs and cat-calls on the other – it must be getting close to election-time.

Those few of us foreign residents who either have the vote or will be voting in the municipal elections to come on May 28th will be doing so in our town of empadronamiento, which, in most cases, will be a smaller conurbation, perhaps somewhere between a thousand and fifty thousand in size.

We may even know the candidates for mayor (and most probably, some folk from their party-list).

The regional elections fall (in many cases) on the same date. If you follow your local TV, you will see the candidates often enough – at least the one for the party that controls that particular autonomía. Of course, no foreigners are able to vote in these elections, making them for us as hechos de otra pasta – a different kettle of fish.

We return to the local ones.

The party candidates will soon have the list of voters (of course, the mayor has it already) and they will be looking for support. Normally, one votes along family lines, which is simple and obvious enough, and one might be considered locally ‘to have so many votes’ under his roof. There may even be rewards: a job for Junior in the town hall, or at the very least, a post in the gardening squad. 

Sometimes, those who have long moved away to the City will keep their name on the padrón, and thus will vote locally, inevitably for family. We foreign residents with the right to vote (that’s to say, EU citizens and some Brits and Norwegians who have claimed their emancipation) are a bit more tricky as we may not be familiar with the candidates and their little foibles, and might lean towards voting along party lines. Perhaps it’s worth putting one of us guiris on the list, safely towards the bottom, to keep us all in step.

Those lists – a candidature is a party list with thirteen or fifteen or more putative councillors on it – will either be (vaguely) representative of a national party or they could be a local effort: ‘Keep Villa de la Sierra Flat’ or some such thing. The parties with the national support will be handing out free lighters and pens, but may on occasion be obliged to march to the tune called out in Madrid. 

The local ones may be short on the complimentary tee-shirts, but will have more freedom in their message. The results are important for the parties with their headquarters in the Spanish capital. With enough town halls in a given province, the diputación (viz. the provincial council), falls under their control.

The budgets will have been passed for the year, but since no one in the ayuntamiento can be completely sure what will happen this time, there may be a good argument for spending the whole year’s worth of funding before then, which also has the advantage of seducing a few on-the-fence voters as the council fills in the potholes, erects some more street-lights and plants a tree or two.

It’s a murky world, local politics.