Joke’s on you, meatbag! Channel 4’s first AI presenter sounds startlingly bleak on so many levels | television

toLast night’s correspondence was titled Will AI Take My Job? Usually when something like this uses a question mark in the title, it’s because the answer is no. But not this time, because the absolute inevitability of AI taking our jobs is truly painful to think about.

According to the film, 8 million jobs in the UK alone are at risk of being outsourced by artificial intelligence. Call center workers, translators, graphic designers – anyone who is not a masseuse or a scaffolder, basically – will soon be made redundant by technology that, despite its disastrous environmental impact, is becoming more sophisticated over time. My days are certainly numbered; It stands to reason that I will soon be replaced by ChatGPT’s demand to “be performatively angry about whatever was on TV”. Grok can also take a secondary image of an unpleasant smug egg to go with it. No one will be the wiser.

But if we know that AI will render us all useless, why would anyone watch Dispatches? And unless they got a damaging boost by furthering their dark beliefs about humanity’s future, there certainly wasn’t much to get excited about. But the movie expected that, and it reacted by pulling out a nice little rug of its own. The episode was presented by journalist Aisha Ghaban. But, listen, it was AI all along.

That’s right, Channel 4 is just Tilly Norwood herself. There was not a single human thing in Gaban. She was a completely computer presence. But despite being a bundle of pixels and icons, she was a rather convincing host. Sure, she was dead behind her eyes, and her mouth couldn’t move the whistle very well, but she sounded somewhat human and had mastered the TV documentary director’s elaborate cadence. What a lark. That person you trust as an authority figure? Not even a person! Joke’s on you, meatbag.

The gist of the show itself was interesting enough, as it took four professionals – a doctor, a lawyer, a musician and a photographer – and pitted them against the best that artificial intelligence had to offer. The thrust of the results seems to be that although humans are better, AI is faster and cheaper. And because greed is the motivating factor for every industry, this means we are all in a very bad position.

Admittedly, some of the technology made sense. For example, a tool that can diagnose patients in half the time it would take a traditional GP has the potential to support human doctors who are already straining under the pressure of a broken system. But who the hell needs an AI photographer? To be sure, the goal of AI is to remove drudgery from our lives, not to automate creativity. The existence of AI photographers points to a terrifying future where we are all doomed to work in full service of machines that vomit up bad art forever.

But anyway, this was just a sideshow for Aisha Jaban, who appears to be Britain’s first AI TV presenter. Frankly, it was hard to see it as just Channel 4 trying to have its cake and eat it. Not only did she get to show off her fancy new toy, she also got to show off the technology she’d created. What a clever trick.

It was difficult to see the film as merely a stark warning to all other Channel 4 presenters. Hey Krishnan Guru Murthy, You better not complain about office snacks in the future, otherwise you’ll get fired in favor of a flashing mannequin we programmed to read Autocue. And no contract disputes from you, Kevin McCloud, because we can replace you with a virtual character who can pout on terrazzo countertops without needing a bathroom break.

And that’s without mentioning the environmental cost of it all. It would have been great if Dispatches had closed the show’s cliffhanger by providing precise details of the amount of water used to power the data center it created, especially given Channel 4’s long-standing commitment to achieving net zero.

Overall, it was an amazingly dark watch on multiple levels. And given the speed at which AI is improving, it’s only going to get worse. Three years from now, you’ll have ChatGPT giving you a clear summary of AI-generated critiques for a show presented by AI-generated hosts, while you dig in the dirt looking for worms to feed your family. Still, it was nice while it lasted, wasn’t it?