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Enough is enough! Nish stages an intervention with Coco about her troubling relationship with Chat GPT. Or as Coco puts it: her mate “Chatty G”.

But Coco’s not the only one embracing generative AI – it’s creeping into politics. From MPs using it in their daily work to the Swedish prime minister turning to it for a second opinion on running the country. Is AI a useful and harmless political tool or will it erode trust even further?

Despairing, Nish catches up with internet pioneer and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. What can our increasingly polarised and trust-depleted world learn from the man who turned a crazy idea into one of the most popular websites in the world? Nish and Jimmy cover Musk’s “Wokepedia” attacks, the rise of AI and the Online Safety Act.

And Nish and Coco check in on some other questionable distortions of reality – featuring everyone’s favourite charlatan Nigel Farage and Prince Andrew’s infamous inability to sweat.

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TRANSCRIPT

[AD]

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK, I’m Nish Kumar.

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan. Nish, you’re in the studio and I’m joining you down the line to Pod Save the Pod from me and my horrible flu I’ve got going on here. Cold, virus, lurgy, whatever.

Nish Kumar Coco has come down with some sort of unspecified combo illness. And as a consequence, for listeners of the podcast, I am sat on my own in the studio in the bonket looking like somebody who overestimated the interest in their own birthday drinks. It’s really g it’s really got the energy of I need the booth for five or six and I’m currently sort of sat here on my own with a laptop out in front of me. Anyway, on the show today, what is truth in an age where the president of the United States can post AI-generated imagery of himself with a crown on his head? The only thing we can be 100% sure of is that man is an absolute clown.

Coco Khan And we’ll drill into truth. Nish speaks to a very special guest, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.

Nish Kumar And later we check on some other questionable distortions of reality featuring everyone’s least favorite charlatan, Nigel Farage. But first.

Clip I love AI. Do you use AI? Absolutely. Do you use ChatGPT? Do you know ChatGPT? I love ChatGPT. I love it. ChatGPT is is fan fantastic.

Nish Kumar Now that is the former Prime Minister of this country. And I think we should all take a second and sit with that fact. I I really feel like increasingly as the years pass and Boris Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister moves further into the rearview mirror, we are going to view him like someone we had sex with whilst incredibly drunk. It has that feel of like, oh my God, I did that with that man. Disgusting. That was Johnson speaking to Al Arabia English. But Coco, we’re not just playing it because of its eternal meme potential and the truly strange way that he chose to pronounce AI and chat GPT. We’re playing it because it’s time for an intervention. Something has troubled me and actually our listenership as well. We need to talk about your friend Chatty G.

Coco Khan Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just for clarity, like we’re not like friends. I have brought him up a few times, I accept that.

Nish Kumar This is exactly the sort of defensiveness you get from an actual intervention. Can I just say?

Coco Khan I’m just saying like, you know, part of me bringing him up is because I know you don’t like Chatty G.

Nish Kumar Listen, everybody knows my feelings on AI, and everybody knows that I am a step away from throwing my phone in the bin and going to live in the woods. Obviously that’s not an option to me because I’m allergic to most things in the woods, but the spirit of it is right. But our listeners have actually also written in. So Yuri has written in and said, Coco, I’m with Nish on this one. Please, and please is capitalized. Please don’t use AI. I’m obligated to do an eye roll every time someone mentions that they used AI, and I’m already at risk of giving myself an injury at my job. I don’t know what job Yuri does, but that’s a very funny thought that somebody would have to be seeing like an optician because they’ve eye rolled too many times that people say they use AI. Kyla said, as much as I love Coco, I do bristle when she mentions her old mate Chatty G. As an actor and voiceover artist that works a day job in the print industry, I see AI as a very real threat to both my actual livelihood and the career I’m trying to transition into. I know AI is coming no matter what. I just hope we can pass worker oriented legislation to minimize resulting job losses and strengthen the social safety net. Coco, what do you say to our listeners who are concerned about your use of AI?

Coco Khan First of all, this is a deeply harrowing moment for me. I don’t really know what to do. I’m so ill and I’m being picked on. This intervention

Nish Kumar This intervention we did we did not know that you would be unwell at the time of this intervention. Now you feel bad, don’t you? Well now it feels like bullying.

Coco Khan Thank you. I hope listeners that have joined us on this journey of this podcast know that I too share many reservations about AI and I have only used, I feel like I’ve I’ve only smoked weed once. I’ve only used Chat GPT a few times and I’ve egged it up for the purpose of annoying Nish. And I’d like to point out that every time I do use it, I often think to myself, how important is this? Can I justify the bottle of water that it takes? And you know, it’s stuff that that I I really need for work.

Nish Kumar Okay, so listeners, Coco was taking your criticism on board. I will say slightly offensive that that seems to have shifted the dial after I’ve spent weeks telling her not to do it. All it took was literally two emails from the listeners and now she’s like, I renounce chat GPD.

Coco Khan I think that’s what you call peer pressure. That’s what that is.

Nish Kumar That’s what that is. Devastating to know Coco doesn’t consider me a peer. Listen, you shouldn’t feel bad for using AI if, like Coco, you use AI, because you’re not the only person doing it, right? So obviously Boris Johnson has given that absolutely unfathomable interview. In that interview, he actually talks about how he’s been using Chat GBD to write his books, and you’re like, of course you fucking have, you lazy piece of shit. Like if there’s one thing we know about Boris Johnson, it’s that he is congenitally bone idle. I can’t believe

Coco Khan I can’t believe, sorry, I missed one production meeting and this whole podcast now is about me using Chat GPT and you’re comparing me to Boris Johnson. I can’t believe it.

Nish Kumar I’m not comparing it to Boris Johnson. Also, can I say this was the this was the producer’s coco. Yeah.

Coco Khan Yeah, I I like. This is bullying. This is

Nish Kumar I

Coco Khan Oh anyway, sorry, go on, please carry on.

Nish Kumar Starmer’s also been actively encouraging the use of AI in Whitehall and he says that he’s determined to seize the golden opportunity that it offers.

Coco Khan Yes, and MPs are using it in their day-to-day to do business. So Labour MP Mark Sewards launched an AI version of himself to answer questions from constituents, which is a little bit creepy. I think that’s a generous way to describe it. But another Labour MP, Mike Reeder, made headlines this summer after being spotted on a train using Chat GPT for casework.

Nish Kumar The same MP Mike Reeder told Politics Home that his team play Chat GPT bingo to spot when they think an MP has used it to write their speech, saying that Chat GPT thinks parliamentary speeches should start with I rise to speak in support of.

Coco Khan Incredible.

Nish Kumar Politics Home’s analysis of Hansard, which is the sort of record of everything that’s said in the House of Commons, shows that the phrase I rise to speak has been used six hundred and one times across the Commons and the Lord so far this year, compared to only a hundred and thirty-one in the first eight months of twenty twenty four and two hundred and twenty-seven times in the same period in twenty twenty three. So, I mean, is it possible that our political representatives are less effective at hiding their use of chatter GPT than children and university students?

Coco Khan Well, Peter Kyle, when he was science secretary, used ChatGPT to come up with policy advice. And that is something that I do genuinely feel strongly about. It’s one thing to say, okay, can you collate some data? Can you read these 10 papers and I don’t know, give me a quick summary? That’s one thing. I think it’s another thing when you’re actually using it to come up with ideas that are going to be sold to the public, and the public have an implied feeling that those policy ideas have come from human beings, from the accountable government, from an entire system that is meant to be at least have some relationship to the notion of democracy. So that is is genuinely quite scary. And over in Sweden, Prime Minister Ulf Christensen has come under fire for admitting that he uses AI as a second opinion on running the country, which is strange because all ChatGPT would say to him is like, that’s a great idea.

Nish Kumar I appreciate that this technology is coming no matter what. There is a part of me that because whenever you talk to people about the benefits of it, they always bring up medical science. And I understand that there are incredible innovations in terms of helping doctors sift through data. But as my parents persistently remind me, I am not a doctor. An X-ray machine is an invaluable asset to a doctor. That doesn’t need mean that I need one in my house. I the whole thing makes me uncomfortable. And and I’m I’m sort of aware that I am very out of step with everything that’s going on around me.

Coco Khan The argument that’s always made is that the technology itself is agnostic, but how it’s used, that speaks to politics and that speaks to power. And yeah, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Because the build of these things already has a political story to it, and the robbery that it does and taking work, that obviously is a political issue. Having said that, though, you know, as you say, this thing is coming, it’s unstoppable. Is expecting our politicians to not use it reasonable? Or is it more reasonable to say, okay, you are, but you have to be upfront about it, you have to say how, and there needs to be guidelines immediately created in the same way that we have like a ministerial code of conduct, for example. Perhaps even use of AI should be included in that. So, as our listener Kyle said, AI is coming no matter what, but we have to be abundantly clear that AI tools are still spouting relatively minor inaccuracies, like the I rise to speak thing. Sometimes it also gives absolute nonsense while delivering it with a confidence that only a robot could give, or a Conservative Party politician.

Nish Kumar And look, and also tech journalists and people who understand this in a bit more detail than us will explain to you that generative AI is still at at this moment in time exclusively based on the input that it’s been given. So that is, you know, all of human history and all of its fallibilities and all of its weaknesses and all of its mistakes is sort of contained within AI. It’s not this kind of omniscient, all seeing God.

Coco Khan Yeah.

Nish Kumar Also, obviously, it is worth talking about the environmental risk. The water usage to cool these data centers is massive. Also, there is growing evidence that AI is making us stupid. So an MIT study suggests that Chat GPT might be eroding critical thinking skills, which obviously, for the purposes of this discussion, is the perfect segue into the master of stupid himself, the American president Donald Trump. So last week, the leader of the free world posted an AI generated clip on his truth social page. For listen to the pod, we’re about to describe it. What we’re seeing is Trump with a crown on his head. Trump is flying a fighter jet that’s called the King Trump and is labeled as such, and then he dumps shit on protesters in American cities. So I mean, there’s any number of reasons why the implications of that are something we should all be very, very concerned about. There is all sorts of ethical conversations that we can go back and forth on. The fact that you can do this and generate this at this speed, particularly from a political communications perspective, is a massive, massive concern. A few months ago, everyone who listens to this podcast will remember there were pictures of Donald Trump with a bruised hand, and it led to various people speculating about the state of his health. There was a lot of speculation online about the potential of a clip from the Oval Office being generated by AI. And internet sleuths surmise that at the very least the video had some AI editing done on it to enhance the video. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, it’s clearly proving the point that we’re needing to attack the things that we see online with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Coco Khan I mean I can’t speak for you, Nish, but even as someone who shamefully does use some of this stuff, I like to think I’m better than some people at spotting this stuff, but it is genuinely hard to see. And there is a concern that people with particularly if they haven’t used these tools before, i it doesn’t take much imagination to see how nefarious actors could misuse this. And of course, already our politics has a problem with trust. It’s only gonna make it worse.

Nish Kumar So, what is truth anymore? I mean, obviously, that’s a massive question. And the question of trust in the information we receive is one that’s clearly going to plague us on a semi-weekly basis on this fucking podcast. In order to get into that conversation this week, I’m actually going to leave Coco to deal with her sickness. And I’m in the studio going to catch up with internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales.

[AD]

Nish Kumar So I am delighted that joining us now is Jimmy Wales. Jimmy is best known for co founding Wikipedia back in two thousand and one. You know what that’s all about. A free online encyclopedia that can be created and edited by anyone at any time. Jimmy, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Jimmy Wales Thanks for having me on.

Nish Kumar Before we get into the book that you’ve written and the conversations that it instigates, I want you to wade in on a little dispute with me and my co-host who’s sadly absent. Coco’s a big fan of Chat GPT, which he lovingly calls Chatty G. I worry that we shouldn’t be using that technology for trivial things. As somebody who, you know, you’ve seen a couple of different iterations of the internet come and go, where where where do you stand on AI and do you use it?

Jimmy Wales I use it all the time. Wow. I use it quite a lot. But Chat GPT, Jim and I, and I do think for a lot of trivial things, i.e., trivia, yeah, unbelievably bad. And you know, if you ask it some basic factual questions, it very often will hallucinate and tell you something wrong, but not just wrong, but wrong and plausible. Right. I mean, okay. Wrong and completely insane. That’s actually less of a problem. You know, it’s like actually one of my favorite tests that I always run. Any new model that I use, anything I practice, I I always type who is Kate Garvey? Kate Garvey’s my wife, and she’s not a famous person, but she’s known a bit. And she worked for Tony Blair for 10 years in number 10, and she’s been written about and she’s done interesting stuff since then and so on. And it’s always wrong. It’s always plausible. And then the best bit is when I say, and who did she marry? Yeah. Which is always wrong and very amusing as well. So it’s some, you know, UK politicians, political journalists. My favorite was when it said that she had married Peter Mandelson, which I and I said to it, I said, Oh, isn’t Peter Mandelson quite famously gay? Yeah. And and it got very woke with me. And it said it’s not really appropriate to speculate about people’s personal sex lives and gay people can get married in the UK. And I said, Well, it must have been quite, you know, in the news a lot, quite a big a big oh, yes. And it told me all about who came to the wedding and all the news coverages. Completely demented.

Nish Kumar Because we should say hallucinates is not a term you’re throwing around idly. That is a very specific technical term.

Jimmy Wales They ingest, you know, trillions, billions of tokens, like everything they’ve read on the internet. And they just dump everything they can find into it. And then it probabilistically guesses based on the conversation that’s gone before, what’s the most likely word or words to come next. Yeah. Which means that it can go down a random weird path. And once it said one thing slightly wrong and it’s reading that, it’s just like, oh, well, then the next word would be this and the next word would be that. And it goes down a path. And, you know, they’re working on that and they have improved it somewhat. But there’s an AI researcher, Gary Marcus, who’s gotten quite not too. He’s sort of has gotten a reputation as being somehow anti-AI, but he’s very quick to insist he’s not anti-AI. He just thinks large language models may be a bit of a dead end because this hallucination problem is it’s not just a minor glitch that has to be fixed. It’s kind of fundamental to way they work.

Nish Kumar Come back to AI later, but let’s let’s talk about the book. It’s titled The Seven Rules of Trust, Why It Is Today’s Most Essential Superpower. You sort of in the book use Wikipedia and the way that it’s evolved as a case study and how important fundamental trust has to be. There seems to be very little trust at the moment in politics and big corporations in the media. What why do you think that is? What what’s undermined our public trust?

Jimmy Wales It’s quite easy to start in on the toxicity of social media, which I do think is a is a problem and is a factor. But the decline in trust is really much older. It’s been going on since you know, probably the the 60s. You know. And I think there are a lot of different causes that are now coming together in kind of a perfect storm. One of the things that we’ve seen m more recently is the decline of local journalism. Yeah. So this is just one one aspect, right? As a result, people don’t really feel like they know what’s going on locally. They don’t have a personal relationship with a local news organization that reports on things they know about. I also think there’s been some, I think problematic, partly driven by the business model pressures, but partly maybe more philosophical retreat from the very idea of facts and neutrality. I mean if we go back to, I mean, these days we think of the problem as being worse on the right, at least many people think of it that way. But of course, we should remember, you know, postmodernism largely from the left was questioning the very idea of objectivity and and neutrality quite some time ago and beginning to undermine the way people were thinking about really kind of old fashioned basic things like, you know, tell the truth and and there are facts and you can describe them fairly or not, and so on. So there’s a lot of different factors, but you know, the real question is, okay, what do we do now? Like how do we build back trust? How do we get back to a culture of trust? And for that, you know, this is a lot of it is sort of drawing on the lessons of Wikipedia. And it’s also a lot of it is quite positive in reminding us actually people value trust. Yeah, people actually do trust other people.

Nish Kumar It’s such an interesting thing, isn’t it? Because I specifically talking about Wikipedia, like I’m 40 years old, reading this book and your reflections on the inceptions of Wikipedia, I felt very nostalgic for the early era of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s. And I feel like I’ve I’ve lived the journey of Wikipedia because I I was I was at university in the mid-2000s at a time where we were being told, don’t cite Wikipedia, don’t use Wikipedia. The former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica compared the site to a public toilet. And now I think of Wikipedia as being this kind of bastion of integrity and thank you research, and everything has to be cited. What were your original hopes for Wikipedia at its inception?

Jimmy Wales Pretty much that. I mean, I I think again on my on my broader theme of let’s not be too down on how the internet has evolved. I mean, we can be a little bit down on it for sure. But, you know, Wikipedia also came out of me observing Usenet. So Usenet back in the day was like best comparison is like Reddit today. Yeah, right. Except unlike Reddit, there was absolutely no moderation whatsoever. Largely though, it was massively full of huge flame wars, like and and sort of people just absolutely vile to each other. Yeah, yeah. You know, you could look at Usenet and say, well, yeah, this Wikipedia idea is completely never gonna work. Because look, people are crazy, you know, like that’s not ever gonna be a thing. But I was convinced that, you know, actually, if the system is designed to make it a little bit easier to do the good thing and a little bit harder to do the bad thing, you can both be quite open, but also move in generally the right direction. And that’s super important that that Wikipedia’s never been a wide open free speech forum, but it should be pretty darn open, you know, to criticism and debate.

Nish Kumar How how do you strike that balance? I mean, one of the things that you talk about in the book is the importance of purpose. Yeah. And Wikipedia has a very clear purpose, and that is it is an encyclopedia.

Jimmy Wales Exactly.

Nish Kumar So it’s it’s neutral language. Everything is ev th there’s a kind of house style that’s almost evolved almost organically. There are words that I only know because of the house style. Like I used the word mononymously in conversation the other day. I only know that word because of Wikipedia like it will say Beyonce Carter Knowles known mononymously as Beyonce. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Is that what you ascribe it to? This this very clear purpose that it was always an encyclopedia.

Jimmy Wales Yeah, I think, you know, sort of Wikipedia is an encyclopedia is one of our sort of core mantras, if you will. And, you know, it and also this is w where I I say, I’m a little bit sympathetic to the social media companies because the problem they face with moderation is a lot harder than ours. Right. Because we have that purpose. Social media always begins with that sort of box that’s like, what’s on your mind? And if you’ve got that sort of really open-ended purpose, wow, then moderating that’s quite hard because some people, you know, what’s on your mind? Well, for a tiny fraction of people, it’s something pretty horrible, you know. It’s a hard problem. Like we can acknowledge that that’s a really hard problem drawing the line. For Wikipedia, it’s a lot easier. It’s just like, yeah, I mean, don’t don’t come on and just start ranting about some horrible person. It’s fine. They might be horrible, you know, like Hitler’s horrible, but we we don’t rant against Hitler in Wikipedia. We talk about how to improve the historical article about Hitler. Yeah, right. And that’s really important.

Nish Kumar But isn’t shouldn’t your sympathy be tempered for those social media companies? Because they are trying to become the only th bit of the internet you use.

Jimmy Wales Moderation’s really hard if your only real business model is getting as many clicks and eyeballs as possible.

Nish Kumar Where there is a kind of algorithmic basis, because obviously that’s not that’s not really present in Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s moderation is done by Wikipedia. Two minds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and listen, I know firsthand the speed at which those people work because in 2017, my cousins who were, I think at the time about 13 and 11, discovered that I had a Wikipedia page. And they also discovered that if they registered to join Wikipedia, they could do whatever they wanted to it. And so they caused absolute havoc on my Wikipedia page. They said that I was best known by the pseudonym Madam Lily, and that I start every morning by shoving a potato in my butt. That those I brilliant. I’m not being impressionistic, Jimmy. I’m quoting verbatim. I’m being very, very direct here. I’m a kind of semi-regular co-host on a podcast that Andy’s Altzman hosts called The Bugle, which I then discussed that on the show, and the bugle listenership absolutely played merry hell with my Wikipedia page and said that for two years I was a host of a naked chat show called Nude with Nish. Now, what I will say is the speed at which the misinformation and the unverifiable information was removed from my Wikipedia.

Nish Kumar Brilliant. Was genuinely remarkable. I imagine social media companies would say part of the reason we have these kind of algorithmic moderations is because people can’t move at that speed. TikTok laid off its entire content moderation team and replaced them with AI-driven systems, with workers in Kenya and the Philippines. But Wikipedia surely is a case study in how the most effective content moderation on the internet is done by people and it’s effective and quick. You know, it’s an apolitical space, it’s supposed to just be fact-based. However, now we live in a kind of very polarized political culture, and Wikipedia has kind of been dragged into some of these culture wars. The conservative think tank in the States, the Heritage Foundation, has laid out plans to identify and target editors of the site who they say that are abusing their position by using facial recognition and a hacked database of usernames and passwords of people involved in Wikipedia. Elon Musk has accused it of being biased against American conservatives, and he, I mean, and just in his characteristic, you know, rhetorical flourish, has been referring to it as Wikipedia. Having read this book and having spoken to for about 10 minutes, I immediately get the sense of your real commitment to facts and journalism and integrity. So it must sting you a little bit to hear that kind of stuff. Separate from the safety concerns about the community of the Heritage Foundation is going to start publishing people’s doxing people. Yeah. How do you feel when you hear allegations like that thrown around?

Jimmy Wales Yeah, I mean, so you know, on the Heritage Foundation, I mean, the main thing I’ve had to say about that is I remember when they used to be intellectually respectable. That’s a ridiculous thing to have said that they would do somebody there should get fired. You know, like that’s all I can say about that. The Wikipedia accusation. So there’s I have two reactions to it. So first, it’s just it isn’t true, right? It isn’t true. The idea that Wikipedia has made some sort of turn against neutrality and has become sort of a left-wing propaganda site is just false. And it’s clearly false if you take a look at the content and you, you know, you really take your time to look at it. At the same time, I I always say, like, if somebody’s got a criticism that Wikipedia is biased, we should take that very seriously. Yeah. And we should not just go, let’s get defensive. I think we should say, you know what, Wikipedia can be biased. And and figuring out where we’re biased and how to fix that and what’s going on, that’s on us. Like we have to really take it seriously. And so I’ll give I’ll give an example that’s a little less fraught with you know, the the culture wars. If you remember the story of Amanda Knox. So Amanda Knox was accused of murdering Meredith Kirchner. And I saw a group of people on Twitter just like really upset about Wikipedia, saying Wikipedia is completely one sided on this. And I thought, oh, I should look into this, you know. And at this point she had been convicted. Yeah. And I read the Wikipedia entry and I was like, you know what? The Wikipedia entry is quite one sided. It basically, from the moment she was convicted, it just said she did it. And and it basically also did not cover the serious problems with the case that had been well documented and reliable sources and so on and so forth. Eventually the conviction was overturned. And Wikipedia should have never taken one side or the other. Sure. Like that’s just not the way we’re supposed to do it. So what happened there? Well, there were a handful of editors who were just quite insistent and they were dominating the discussion and some people from the other side, because oftentimes what happens, and we can talk about this in the broader culture wars in a second, is people drum up support somewhere outside Wikipedia and people come in like warriors and they don’t follow the rules of Wikipedia and they come in and start ranting and they get themselves banned. And then then the conversation goes to and anybody who disagrees gets banned immediately. And it’s like, no, anybody who comes in acting like a dick gets banned immediately. It’s not about disagreeing. It’s like you can’t rule for your life. Yeah, it’s a good life. In general, it’s really as important. And so, you know, when this is why I’ve said this to Elon, and I think it’s really important is to say, like, look, if you go around saying Wikipedia has been hijacked by a bunch of left-wing lunatics, then you’re doing two things. First of all, you’re telling kind, thoughtful conservatives who see a problem with bias in some entries in Wikipedia, either that they shouldn’t come at all, or that if they do come, they should come prepared to do battle with left-wing lunatics. And then the second thing you’re doing is you’re sort of signaling to any left-wing lunatics out there, your new home, Wikipedia. And then we have to deal with them, right? Like, because we know there are people who are super ideological, not really interested in facts on every side of the political spectrum. And what we really want are people who are like, okay, right. Here’s my position and my view on whatever matter it might be. But I get that Wikipedia isn’t the place to campaign. It’s just to document the facts. And I think one of the reasons people can broadly trust Wikipedia is that we try really hard to say, let’s be fair to all sides of a debate. Let’s document what the debate is.

Nish Kumar Where does AI stand in terms of its relationship with Wikipedia? Is is it about to make the job of the website and the purpose of the website harder to maintain?

Jimmy Wales Well, I you know, I don’t think so, but I do think there are a lot of things we should all be thinking about and have some concerns about. So we talked already about the AI is not yet good enough. Yeah. It hallucinates, you know, so it can’t m write Wikipedia entries. And we’re still a few days away from the launch of Elon’s Grocopedia, which will be written by AI completely. And so it’s too early to comment, except I’m sure it’s gonna be terrible, you know. Like that’s just I because I’m I have deep experience in writing encyclopedias and I’m like, Yeah, it’s way too hard for AI right now. But when we Does he just have a problem with Wikipedia? Do you think he

Nish Kumar He’s just annoyed that he can’t buy Wikipedia. I think he’s just annoyed he can’t buy Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales Tried Wikipedia and you you’ve responded repeatedly. You know, the most important thing to note is that figuring out what’s going on in Elon Musk’s mind is a fool’s errand. Like you have no idea what he’s thinking. You know, when we think about AI with Wikipedia, obviously, in some ways, we’re happy that AI is training on Wikipedia because you wouldn’t want an AI trained solely on Twitter. Like that would be a very bad AI. But we also are interested in thinking about, okay, well, look, it’s definitely not good enough to write Wikipedia entries, but what are some of the ways that we might use this technology to help us? Yeah. And so, you know, some of the ideas I’ve played with. I wrote a little script to use AI to like, okay, go to a short Wikipedia entry and feed in the entry and feed in the five sources. And say, is there anything in these sources that could be in Wikipedia but isn’t? Or is there anything in the Wikipedia entry that is not supported by the sources? And does Wikipedia introduce any bias that that is not in the sources? Those kinds of questions. And you know what? It can generally the better models can make useful suggestions. And they’re not perfect, but that’s okay. You’re just making suggestions. So that’s the kind of thing that I think we are we’re gonna explore to say, is there a way that we can take out some of the tedium and sort of have the resources you might need to fix something? You know, even just reporting bias. Yeah, to say, like, hey, here’s a fairly obscure article. Boy, it seems one-sided. Okay, or it contains language that sounds inflammatory.

Nish Kumar I want to talk to you just before we let you go about two sort of specific pieces of UK related news. The Online Safety Act, which we’ve spoken about a couple of times on the show, just as a reminder, it set tough new requirements for platforms and has actually managed to sort of quite uniquely been criticized by absolutely everybody across the political spectrum. There seems to be real concerns from everybody about curtailing free speech. The Wikipedia Foundation actually made a legal challenge saying that the bill could severely s impede the site’s operations, which was defeated in August of this this year. What were the grounds for the challenge? And what what do you think that the online safety act disadvantages a site like Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales Yeah, so you know, the the online safety act is well meaning in certain regards. You know, we can acknowledge that, like online safety is is very important. However, elements of it are actually contrary to safety completely. So here here’s an example. And it it’s a little complicated, but it’s important. So if we get categorized as category one, which is the highest risk site, which we could be because of the size of Wikipedia, like the sheer number of users, then if if one user blocks another user, then what we’re supposed to do, we would have a responsibility to make sure that you basically don’t see that person’s content anymore. So that means a troll can go through and block a bunch of editors who oppose them on some subject, and those editors can no longer edit the article that they’re having a debate about because they’re no longer able to see that person’s content that they’ve produced. I mean, it’s colLabourative editing. So this idea of blocking people and not seeing their content anymore applies to social media. Like if I block you, I’m not gonna see your posts anymore. Okay, that’s simple, right? But we’re working together colLabouratively editing. And then the idea that we need to identify volunteers, which could be, for example, for age-gating purposes, yeah, that’s super dangerous. Like one of the things that’s really important to us is that a lot of people who are editing Wikipedia in places like Russia, yeah, Saudi Arabia, places where you can get in real trouble for speaking some fairly simple truths, anonymous editing is quite important. So our court case was thrown out for technical reasons, really. I would term it technical reasons. It’s basically the judge, this is my interpretation, I’m not a lawyer, has said, well, nothing bad has actually happened to you yet. Right. Okay. Because Ofcom might rule a certain way, but they haven’t. So it’s too early. But also gave instructions saying Wikipedia would have quite a good case. Right. Like if it came to this. And so now the latest I just saw that Ofcom is sort of reported we we actually are as a result of the court case, we’re actually gonna have to take a little more time because these human rights issues have been raised. Like, yeah, human rights issues like freedom of expression for people who are trying to write Wikipedia articles.

Nish Kumar I do want to mention the fact that you end the book talking about the tragic death of Joe Cox, the British MP who was murdered by Thomas Mare, who had a long history of supporting white supremacy and white supremacist movements. Joe was actually a friend of yours. So I imagine it’s quite a difficult thing to include in the book. Wha why did you decide to include it?

Jimmy Wales It’s because I really wanted to talk about, you know, what is the end point of a toxic culture. We criticize in the book at some point, Elon Musk called a UK politician pure evil. Yeah. And it’s like, wow, pure evil. Like pure evil is not, here’s someone I disagree with. Pure evil’s not, I think this person is corrupt. Pure evil is like, what do you do with pure evil? Yeah. You you can’t really debate with pure evil. You can’t really have a constructive dialog with pure evil. That kind of rhetoric gets people killed. And it gets people killed on both sides. I mean, Charlie Kirk is a great example of a person who I would have a great many disagreements with politically. And yet he was a person who was just out talking to people. That’s literally what he was doing is is campaigning for ideas that people don’t agree with. And if we’re to the point where we think, yeah, the thing to do is shoot people, now we’re we’re in a really sad spot. And that comes from this fundamental breakdown in trust where you say, Oh, there are people I disagree with who they’re just horrible people and there’s no talking to them. Wow, that’s really sad.

Nish Kumar The the Edelman Trust Barometer in two thousand and twenty five found that across twenty eight countries, forty two percent of people felt their country is very or extremely divided, and twenty-eight percent of people felt that their country could not get over those divides. What keeps you hopeful that we can resolve the chasm that seems to exist between large chunks of our societies? And is it your experience with Wikipedia of generally that if you leave a group of people together, they can actually cooperate and develop something that is fact based and reasonable?

Jimmy Wales I yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, I think if we look at the bigger cultural pictures and statistics like that, you can fall into despair. But then you can also, as I say, like remember, like most people you meet are pretty nice. Yeah, you know, and that that we can get back to that. There’s a little bit of research. I don’t think it’s clear yet, but there is some research that suggests that people who are talking to AI have a little bit of that as well. Right. That they are they come down off of some extremist views by having an AI that will challenge them and sort of bring in other perspectives a little bit. And that’s kind of good, right? You know, that’s much better than if your algorithms and the way your site’s designed is keeping people on the site longer, but also leading people to think that you’re destroying Western civilization. Yeah. That’s a business problem in the long run. Yeah. Like that’s really short term. Instead, you want, and I think this is what people at YouTube and places they are aware, it’s like, you actually want to go, yeah, you know what? I actually really like YouTube. Like I I see all kinds of stuff on there. Yeah. There’s, you know, amazing content. I found this great comedian I’d never heard of, watched 20 videos. That’s fantastic, you know. I’m learning about Dynamo DB databases and single table design and you know, like whatever it might be, that’s the good positive feel that you should get from that kind of open space with all kinds of creativity and cool stuff. Not like, yeah, I really liked YouTube until my 13 year old painted a swastika on his forehead, you know. Like that that that wasn’t the greatest moment. It’s not good, Mark.

Nish Kumar That comedian’s name, by the way, was of course Madam Lily. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Jimmy’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is out on Tuesday.

[AD].

Now, after the break, I’ll be reunited with Illness’s Coco Khan to discuss some bizarre distortions of the truth by none other than Prince Andrew and Nigel Farage.

Coco Khan [AD]

Coco Khan So, Prince Andrew is giving up all his royal titles. It comes after fresh allegations surrounding his friendship with the late convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, ahead of the publication of Virginia Dufrey’s posthumous memoir.

Nish Kumar Jeffrey claims he had sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions, including when she was seventeen and once in an orgy with Epstein and at least eight other girls, and that Epstein’s team tried to hire internet trolls to hassle her online.

Coco Khan Prince Andrew has long denied all allegations, but did anyone really trust a word that came out of this man’s mouth? I mean, if anyone needs a reminder, listen to this clip from the famous 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlist.

Clip There’s a slight problem with with with with with the sweating, because I I I have a peculiar m medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time.

Nish Kumar Still so shockingly strange. No matter how many times I hear that, it still blows me away every time. The big lie that was made back in twenty nineteen, though, and I think is probably the source of the most recent round of disquiet about Andrew that’s led to this news, is that he cut off all communications with Epstein after a walk in the park back in twenty ten.

Coco Khan This week, however, emails have surfaced proving this claim to be untrue, with the Prince emailing Epstein saying, We are in this together and urged them to play some more suit.

Nish Kumar I mean, I’m amazed this sort of lie’s been able to hold for this long. Is anybody surprised that he maintained contact with Epstein after this in spite of the fact that he said that he didn’t? I don’t know if it’s possible to furiously shrug your shoulders, but it feels like that has probably been the attitude of the public of, yeah, we knew this was the case all along. He should have lost his world titles years ago. I can’t believe that it’s taken this long. It reminds me a little bit of Starmer’s approach with Mandelson in that you make the decision so late that no one’s actually going to give you credit for having made the decision. There’s actually just a simmering sense of anger that it’s taken this long to come around to a reasoned perspective on this.

Coco Khan The thing is though if he hasn’t lost his titles, he’s saying he will no longer use his royal titles, but he’ll still technically hold them because they can’t actually be removed unless it’s with an act of parliament. And despite mounting pressure, the government is not gonna do it. They’re saying they’re not gonna initiate it until the palace has. Well, why would the palace do it? Anyway, here’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson spousing this line to Radio Four on Monday.

Clip This isn’t a matter for the government and we do support the statement that the Royal Family issued and the action that’s been taken.

Nish Kumar I’ve got to say I am slightly confused with that line of reasoning. A prince within the royal family of this country is accused of sexually assaulting a child. I don’t understand how that is not a matter for the government. Okay? The government is taking a string of very strong positions, rightly so, on the issue of grooming gangs in this country. But when you dismiss this story as being not a matter for the government, it makes me really question how seriously you are taking the issue of protecting children from sexual abuse. I think it sends a very, very strange message about power, and it makes it look like the sexual assault of children is something we’re very worried about unless a person is so powerful that they essentially exist above the laws of our country. We should say that these are still and remain allegations, but they are incredibly serious allegations, and they have been mounting for years and years and years. And I find the line that this is not a matter for the government quite nauseating, to be honest with you.

Coco Khan I mean, the the politicization of crimes against women and girls is old school. That it’s been happening for centuries. It’s always been my great frustration with the conversation around the grooming gangs. I mean, listen, I I’m a feminist. I want every perpetrator who has hurt a young woman or child in this way to to really feel the full impact of the law. And I want to see those rape conviction rates, which are, you know, hovering somewhere between one and three percent abysmal. I want to see those improved. Of course, but you cannot deny that the fact that the government is trying to take that more seriously is political because the perpetrators are men of color and they’re Muslim men, predominantly. Although, of course, we know that grooming in general is a multi-ethnic affair. That is a is of course an enormous frustration. If you just put aside the moral necessity of taking action when a representative of the UK is accused of such a heinous crime, putting that aside, even just for Labour to be shown that they’re tough on things like that. I mean, it’s not like loads of Labour voters love the royal family either. You know, there’s a part of me that’s like, this is a slam dunk for you. Your voter base don’t care for the royal family. You know, this could actually be good for the Labour Party to be seen to be doing the right thing and actually doing something that, as you say, these rumors have been in circulation for a very long time. Previous prime ministers, previous governments wouldn’t have dared. You know, Keir Starmer could really show himself here. But here we are. We’re back to the same conversation we always have about a a Labour Party, what does it believe and where is its spine?

Nish Kumar So there is some mounting pressure on this. So on Tuesday, the SNP lodged an early day motion to formally remove his duked and with immediate effect. They’d actually lodged a similar motion on this in September, aiming to remove the peerage of Peter Mandelson, who was sacked as the ambassador to the US, as we’ve said, when the extent of his friendship with Epstein was revealed. Yeah, I think that it sends a very strange message out and it creates this sense that the government is only really bothered about sex crimes when the perpetrators are men of color. Who the fuck are the royal family, if not intrinsically connected to the British government and the British state? Let’s move on to I guess equally frustrating news. Bloomberg journalist Michel Hussein sort of found us at front and center of a piece of reform UK propaganda. It’s absolutely bizarre. Let’s have a look and listen to this clip.

Clip Well a big sit-down with Michelle Hussein, no not of the BBC and Today program, as she was for so many years, but now here at Bloomberg, this incredible media and financial news headquarters. And yeah, it’s a big sit-down. I don’t do that many big interviews these days, but it’s a bit about me, it’s a bit about economic policy, and of course it’s the old Russia hoax stuff that comes up again and again. But you know, I made it clear. I made it clear whatever the historical reasons for the mess we’re in, whatever view we take on that, if Russian planes incur over NATO territory, we have to shoot them down, Putin’s behavior is terrible. So I hope that finally puts this nonsense to bed.

Nish Kumar It’s a sort of very slickly produced piece of political communication, which sort of has a montage of Nigel Farage kind of walking around the Bloomberg office like he owns it, and seems to suggest that he had a very sort of chummy chat with Michel Hussein, and there’s a sort of footage of her smiling and greeting him. However, a clip that’s been circulating from the interview this week online has told a slightly different story about the tone of the conversation. Let’s have a look and a listen.

Clip So if you were Prime Minister w and NATO jets entered Russian jets entered NATO airspace, where do you stand on that? Do you think they should be Gotta shoot them down. No questions. Whatever that does, however much that inflames tensions. Russia needs to be taught a lesson.

Clip Listen, love, you’re trying ever so hard. I’m the only person in the world, I think, that stood up in the European Parliament in twenty fourteen and d do you know what I said? There will be a war in Ukraine. It’s coming. I’m the only person that got it right.

Nish Kumar Listen love. Yeah. Twenty twenty five. The leader of a political party, a person who, according to some polling estimations, is set to be the next Prime Minister of this country, has just said listen love in an interview with a journalist.

Coco Khan And like, you know, one of the most formidable political journalists in the country. Absolutely talking to her like a a child. Or even worse, maybe. The thing is, is that a lot of how people are talking about it as though it’s like the mask has slipped, but not really. I mean, Nigel Farage’s brand is patronizing. He is not a friend of women and girls, despite whatever he might say. I mean, th this probably appeals to his base.

Nish Kumar So at the time of recording, where we are on Wednesday morning, that’s the only clip that’s been released of the actual conversation. The full interview is out at six AM on Friday. So I guess eventually we’ll find out this week how much of a train wreck it was. My my feeling is that when I watched listen, I have no way of substantiating this, but when I watched the reform clip, the first instinctive reaction was, Oh, that interview has gone really badly. And he’s basically it just felt like he was trying to say. Had a great interview with Bloomberg, really great chat, covered all the subjects, answered all the questions. You don’t need to watch it. Don’t waste your time. You don’t need to watch it, everybody. I absolutely smashed it. It sounded like a kid at school. It was like, I went on a date with a girl yesterday. We kissed, she achieved orgasm simply from me looking at her. Don’t ask her about it for the love of God. But because you’d be wasting your time.

Coco Khan It also gives him a second bite of the cherry, so to speak, because he has spoken about Russia with Hussein and we don’t know how well that went. I mean, Russia is his Achilles’ heels, so probably there’s a little bit of anxiety around there. And it gives him an opportunity to sort of say his line again, like, you know, we covered it off. I said we’ll shoot it down, right? Also, just I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a pretty good tactic. So I think maybe what I might do after we’ve recorded this is take to Instagram and be like, just recorded Pod Save the UK, my old friend Nish Kumar. You know, we covered off all sorts of things. And you know, we finally put to bed this chatty G business. You know, I I was never that interested in it anyway. So it’s been a great day.

Nish Kumar Nigel Farage has a 30-year sort of track record of engagement and appeasement around Russia. He’s appeared regularly on Russia Today. He also has called Vladimir Putin the leader that he most admires. Not to mention, and for more detail on this is worth listening to last week’s episode where we had a conversation about the ex-reform leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who has had to step down because he he has admitted to accepting bribes from the Russian government. And what I would say is that that is what it looks like when Nigel Farage is pushed or challenged on any kind of a point. The sort of veneer of Bon Hermi and the kind of convivial man down the pub who’s just having a real ale and sharing the thoughts that most people really think collapses on the merest contact with scrutiny. And if he is sort of thrust into this position where he goes into the next election as the favorite to be the next prime minister, it’s going to be incumbent on political journalists who are interviewing him to push him on these kind of issues. And I again this is purely a gut feeling I have, but my suspicion is the more Farage is pushed on these issues, the more the veneer of him being this sort of, you know, knockabout fun guy will collapse. He comes across as a nasty piece of work. And I think the phrase listen, love is so patronizing and just absolutely reeks of rank misogyny.

Coco Khan Oh absolutely.

Nish Kumar And just in terms of like reforms engagement, th there’s two quick stories that we should just sort of allude to. The Independent this week covered the story that Nigel Farage has appointed an anti-abortion theologian essentially. Guy called James Orr has been appointed as a senior advisor to reform. He is a a sort of anti-abortionist with strong US ties, who’s very close to J.D. Varns. And he is part of this growing nexus that we’ve referred to constantly of a kind of right-wing cabal that is trying to push abortion laws in the UK and turn it into a flashpoint in the way it has become in the United States of America. So again, just on that specific issue of Farage and women’s rights, it’s worth looking up that story that the Independent ran this week. Also, we should discuss again briefly the fact that, you know, this is a show with two South Asian hosts. There was a story in The Guardian this week that re support for reform is surging amongst British Indians. It’s still low. We should contextualize this, it’s still low. It’s at around 13%, but that is compared to four percent in the last election, according to research by the nineteen twenty eight institute. Coco, what the fuck is going on?

Coco Khan I mean, it’s really sad. I feel like we are b increasingly part of this. We’re of a generation where you were British South Asian, right? And we were all kind of, you know, we had like shared culture, shared foods, you know, this kind of shared identity, particularly in the face of coming to the empire’s center and trying to forge a new life for ourselves. And I feel like then nine eleven happened and then the cleave began between like religious things. I feel like we are of this last generation who are saying, no, we we are we have a shared identity and we choose it. We actively choose it and we won’t be divided. Seeing stories like this makes me scared, makes me sad. I’m just telling myself that it’s a very small demographic of people who have drank the Modi Kool-Aid and just really hate Muslims.

Nish Kumar You’re saying there’s a cleave opening up between the Hindu and Muslim communities. I mean, I certainly think that that’s definitely a massive factor here. I I just I would say just once again, Nigel Faraj and the Reform Party’s position is hostile towards the concept of indefinite leave to remain. That is not something that you can insulate yourself from, regardless of your ethnicity. Okay. This man is not a friend to the South Asian community. And South Asian supporting reform. I guess like Turkeys voting for Christmas might not be the appropriate religion, but what is appropriate in this of all weeks is to call them fireworks voting for Diwali. Happy Diwali. And that’s it. Thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Don’t forget to follow us on at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter and on Blue Sky. Pod Save the UK is a reduced listening production for Crooked media.

Coco Khan Thanks to senior producer James Tinsdale and producer Mae Robson with additional support from Narda Smilinic.

Nish Kumar Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Coco Khan The executive producers are Will Yates and Katie Long with additional support from Ari Shwartz.

Nish Kumar And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.