Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a freelance television producer. I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Ravensdale on having secured this debate.

Last night, I went on to the ChatGPT website and asked it to write me a speech on the subject in this debate that worries me—the threat that AI poses to journalism—and this is a paragraph that it came up with:

“AI, in its tireless efficiency, threatens to overshadow human journalism. News articles can be automated, and editorials composed without a single thought, a single beating heart behind the words. My fear is that we will descend into a landscape where news is stripped of the very human elements that make it relatable, understood, and ultimately, impactful”.


Many noble Lords might agree that that is a frighteningly good start to my speech. I assure them that, from now on, whatever I say is generated by me rather than ChatGPT.

Generative artificial intelligence has many benefits to offer broadcasting and journalism. For instance, the harnessing of its data processing power will allow a big change in coverage of next month’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest by ITN. Not only will it allow the voiceover to be instantly translated, but it will also be able to manipulate the British sports presenter’s voice to broadcast in six to seven languages simultaneously. This will bring cost savings in translation and presenter fees.

Already there is an Indian television service, Odisha TV, which has an AI-generated presenter that can broadcast throughout the night in several Indian languages. Synthetic voice-generated AI has already arrived and is available for free. The technology to manipulate an image so that a speaker’s lips are synchronised with the voice is commercially available, improving and becoming cheaper by the month. All these advances threaten on-screen and journalistic jobs.

However, noble Lords should be concerned by the threat to the integrity of high-quality journalism, an issue raised by my AI-generated introduction. We are now seeing AI accelerating trends in digital journalism, taking them further and faster than we would have thought possible a few years ago. Noble Lords have only to look at what is happening with AI search. At the moment, many of us will search via a browser such as Google, which will present us with a variety of links, but with AI search the information required is given at a quite different level of sophistication.

For instance, when asked, “What is the situation in Ukraine?”, the new Microsoft AI search tool will give an apparently authoritative three-paragraph response. It will have searched numerous news websites, scraped the information from those sites and sorted them into a three-paragraph answer. When the AI search engine was asked for the provenance of the information, it replied that

“the information is gathered from a variety of sources, including news organisations, government agencies and think tanks”.

Requests for more exact details of the news websites used failed to deliver a more specific answer. As a result, it is not possible for the user to give political weight to the information given, nor to discover its editorial trustworthiness. As many other noble Lords have mentioned, the ability to create deepfakes allows AI to synthesise videos of our public figures saying anything, whether true or not. There is nothing in the terms and conditions for the tech companies to ensure that the answers are truthful.

The very existence of quality journalism is at risk. Already we are seeing the newspaper industry brought to its knees by the big tech platforms’ near-monopoly of digital advertising spend. This has greatly reduced the advertising spend of newspapers, on which much of their revenue depends. Social media is aggregating content from established news sites without paying fees proportionate to the expense of gathering news. The effect on the industry is disastrous, with the closure of hundreds of papers resulting in local news deserts, where the proceedings of local authorities and magistrates are no longer reported to the public. The new AI technology is further exacerbating the financial threat to the whole industry. AI-generating companies can scrape for free the information from news websites, which are already facing the increasing costs of creating original journalistic content. Meanwhile, many AI sites, such as Microsoft’s new AI service, are charging up to $30 a month.

I have been involved in the Online Safety Bill, which has done a wonderful job, with co-operation from the Government and all Benches, to create a law to make the internet so much safer, especially for children. However, it does not do anything to make the internet more truthful. There needs to be pressure on the generative AI creators to ensure that information that they are giving is truthful and transparent. The leaders of our public service media organisations have written to Lucy Frazer, asking her to set up a journalist working group on AI bringing together the various stakeholders in this new AI world to work out a government response. The letter is addressed to DCMS but I would be grateful if the Minister, whose portfolio covers AI policies, could ensure that his department takes an active role in setting up this crucial group.

An election is looming on the horizon. The threat of a misinformation war will make it difficult for voters properly to assess policies and politicians. This war will be massively exacerbated by search AI. It is time for the Government to take action before the new generation of information technology develops out of control.