Latest news with #JimHacker
Spectator
5 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Does anyone really want AI civil servants?
Of course they've called it 'Humphrey'. The cutesy name that has been given to the AI tool the government is rolling out across the civil service with unseemly haste is a nod – as those of an age will recognise – to the immortal sitcom Yes, Minister. But it may also prove to be more appropriate than they think. The premise of that show, you'll recall, is that Sir Humphrey is the person really in charge – and that he will at every turn imperceptibly thwart and subvert the instructions given to him by the elected minister. Why is Sir Keir Starmer so absolutely hellbent on turning us into, in his wince-makingly gauche phrase, 'an AI superpower'? At least in the show, we're encouraged to believe that Sir Humphrey undermines Jim Hacker because he's cleverer and has the best interests of the nation at heart. But an AI Humphrey has no such redeeming qualities: if it undermines the elected minister, it'll be for no reason other than an algorithmic sport. Item one: generative AI hallucinates. It makes stuff up. Nobody knows exactly why, and nobody knows how to stop it doing so. Some experts in the field say that there's a good chance that the problem will get worse rather than better over time: after all, as an ever-greater proportion of the zillions of words of text on the internet comes to be AI-generated, and AI models are therefore training on the outputs of AI models, those hallucinations are going to be baked in. Garbage in, garbage out, as programmers like to say. So though ChatGPT and its cousins are a fantastic boon to people who don't want to do their work – be they lazy undergraduates, lawyers who can't be bothered to comb through case law and write their own briefs, or government ministers who imagine the savings to be made if bureaucratic emails were to start writing themselves – they come with significant risks. It's not just those notorious Google searches that encourage you to put glue on pizza. Already, we're seeing cases coming to court where lawyers have used AI to draft their arguments, and it has emerged that the LLM has invented its legal citations out of whole cloth. Academic work is being turned out with footnotes leading to works that don't exist, and imaginary bibliographies. More than one US newspaper published a syndicated 'summer reading' special in which several of the books it recommended didn't exist. Is this going to be a problem when it comes to the machinery of Whitehall? I would say so, wouldn't you? The Post Office Horizon scandal – which had at its root a lot of credulous officials believing everything that a malfunctioning computer told them – ruined lives and cost the taxpayer a small fortune in compensation and in the inquiries that had to sort out the whole mess. Embedding a large language model at the heart of government is a recipe for any number of repeat performances. It seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that the legal risk will outweigh any vaunted efficiency savings – to say nothing of the potential for human suffering if the LLM goes wonky in the tax and benefits systems. The promise to 'have meaningful human control at the right stages' sounds like an excellent principle – but it's not clear how it can be more than an aspiration. You won't know when you've got it wrong until it bites you in the bum. And people, remember, are lazy. What's the betting that they won't always bother to check the computer's homework when the homework sounds plausible enough, and it's getting towards time for a pint in the Red Lion? Item two: there is a moral case as well as a practical one against Humphrey. Not only does generative AI have serious environmental costs, but it's a plagiarism machine. ChatGPT, which is one of the models on which Humphrey has been built, is known to have scraped text to train its models from piracy websites. This is still a live legal issue. And as Ed Newton-Rex of the campaign group Fairly Trained has put it: 'The government can't effectively regulate these companies if it is simultaneously baking them into its inner workings as rapidly as possible.' Why is Sir Keir Starmer so absolutely hellbent on turning us into, in his wince-makingly gauche phrase, 'an AI superpower'; so keen to jump the gun that he hadn't even allowed the public consultation on AI and copyright to conclude before he pushed the government's recommendations – which were, basically, to let copyright holders be damned. He seems to have been seduced by the blandishments of the salespeople for this technology, whose main sales tool is FOMO. AI is a solution in search of a problem. Big tech has invested so much in it that they're trying to brute-force it into every area of life, and they are succeeding. Of course, one can see how – for instance – using AI to minute meetings or draft memos can save costly man-hours. But the way to integrate it into the machinery of Whitehall is, or should be, with extreme caution and on a case-by-case basis, not with the panicky haste of someone who's been persuaded by a lobbyist that if you don't go all-in on this exciting new technology as fast as possible you're going to be left behind. It seems something of a tell, for instance, that Principle 8 in the government's own AI Playbook is: 'You work with commercial colleagues from the start.' As Sir Humphrey would say: 'No, Prime Minister.'
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Griff Rhys Jones 'honoured' by Yes, Minister role
Griff Rhys Jones has entertained the nation for five decades. He is best-known for his comedy sketches as a regular on Not The Nine O'Clock News and the iconic series Alas Smith and Jones. But now Cardiff-born Rhys Jones will step into the shoes of beloved character Jim Hacker as I'm Sorry, Prime Minister heads to the West End. "The great TV series, and latterly the plays, are part of my architecture of British comedy," said Rhys Jones. Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, ran from 1980 to 1988. Set in the private office of a British cabinet minister in the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs in Whitehall, the show follows the ministerial career of Hacker, played by Paul Eddington. Rhys Jones said he was "delighted and honoured" to be taking on the role for the "final, funny and poignant episode of [Hacker's] long career". "They have always been the first and last word on the shenanigans that we call politics. "Sorry, Prime Minister is as acute and apposite as ever. It will be a hoot," he said. Speaking on his love of the show, Rhys Jones said Yes, Minister had the basis of a great play, especially a comedy. "It is one of the greatest comic inventions of the last 50 years. It manages to be human and satirical, and full of character, charm and insight. "You never left an episode without going 'oh that's really fascinating'," he said. The stage adaptation of Yes, Prime Minister premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre in May 2010. The final chapter of the series, I'm Sorry, Prime Minister, will head to the West End next year following runs at The Barn Theatre in Cirencester, Theatre Royal in Bath and Cambridge Arts Theatre. "The great thing about this play was I read it and it made me laugh. The truth is, I love being onstage and making people laugh. It's a joy to do," he said. I'm Sorry, Prime Minister follows Hacker as he hopes for a quiet retirement from government as the master of Hacker College, Oxford. Instead he finds himself facing the ultimate modern crisis: cancelled by the college committee. Enter Sir Humphrey Appleby, played by Clive Francis, who has lost none of his love for bureaucracy, Latin phrases, and well-timed obstruction. While rehearsals for the play start in January 2026, Rhys Jones said he had started thinking of inspiration for the role. "I have been studying older people and prime ministers that date from that period because I don't want to try and do an imitation of Paul Eddington. "But there's a little of John Major and there's little bit of David Cameron. "There's a little bit of everybody in there." Comic backs restoration of Victorian landmark Griff Rhys Jones leads Liverpool Street works fight Gavin and Stacey star says show will not return
Evening Standard
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Griff Rhys Jones returns to stage in I'm Sorry, Prime Minister
The political landscape has certainly changed since the 1980s. The fictional world of Jim Hacker seems benign compared to both the expletive-filled sitcom successor The Thick Of It and the modern reality. "Politics ought to be the art of the possible but it seems to be about is the art of the impossible," observes Rhys Jones. "One of the major problems is that government can't seem to do anything. That's one of the reasons why they are opening the door for people like Reform."
Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Jonathan Lynn: ‘People are running the country who have never had a proper job'
T here is nothing so ex as an ex prime minister. It has been a long time since Jim Hacker rose to the top of the greasy pole. Now in his eighties he is a sad and diminished figure, leaky in mind and bladder, increasingly forgotten by an ungrateful nation. The fellows of the Oxford college that bears his name, thanks to an oligarch's endowment, want to remove him as their master, them having a different understanding to the Lords of what 'job for life' means, and in desperation he calls an old friend. Alas, Bernard Woolley can't come to the phone — Hacker forgot that he had attended his funeral — and so he turns to an old adversary. Can the man who became PM
