Alex Mulholland is a Newcastle-based street artist, known as Mul, who is perhaps best known for his famous ‘running heart’ character. There is a vibrant, cartoonish, playful aspect to his work, which he has coined ‘disco style’. His work is seen in many locations in the North East, and he also has pieces in Rome, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

I’ve been to see his very short-run ‘pop-up takeover’ exhibition, which is as playful as you’d expect from his work. There was a mobile interactive element to the exhibition—one could point one’s phone at pieces, and they would ‘come to life’. I’m afraid I didn’t engage, preferring to look at the work with my eyes rather than through a phone screen.

Perhaps because I didn’t engage with that element, I’ll confess that the whole thing felt a tiny bit flat to me. It’s great to see Mul getting recognition, but seeing a load of his work collected together in a gallery isn’t nearly as fun as happening across it in ‘the real world’.

I did, however, enjoy the video installation showing the creation of one of his street works, and I enjoyed the way he had brought the ephemera of the real world—signs, tyres, etc—into the gallery.

The three-day pop-up of ‘The Art of Disco’ continues at the Baltic, but only until tomorrow.

I’ve previously read Max Porter’s popular book Grief is the Thing With Feathers and not really liked it. But so popular is his writing that I thought I’d give it another go with Shy, a novella covering a few hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

Like the previous book, this just wasn’t up my street. The writing was a bit too abstract and confusing. Some people have described it as poetic, and perhaps it is, but it’s not a style of poetry with which I connect.

I don’t think I’d pick up another of Porter’s books, but mine seems to be a minority opinion, so don’t assume that you won’t like them.

There’s a typically brilliant piece by Liam Shaw on the LRB blog right now about the recent use of an AI tool to assist in the discovery of an antibiotic: abaucin.

There is much important detail in Shaw’s blog which was missing from most of the media coverage on this topic. Most crucially from a health perspective, this antibiotic is likely to be useful only in topical applications (onto the skin) whereas the majority of harm from the single species the antibiotic treats—Acinetobacter baumannii—is from sepsis. It is a significant discovery, but mostly in the sense of being a staging post on the long road of development, rather than as an end in itself.

Shaw is also specific about the techniques used, and their limitations:

As well as powerful neural networks, the machine learning model depends on the existence of carefully collected data from thousands of experiments. It’s still a vast screening project, just not as vast as it would be without the AI component: it uses the data to find the best ‘ready to use’ molecule from the available options.

The discovery of abaucin shows that AI is helpful for the early stage of winnowing down the vast space of chemical possibility, but there’s still a lot to do from that point onwards.

This is useful because it feels like we are in a moment where ‘AI’ is used to refer to myriad things, and using the term on its own is not very helpful. It feels akin to the early 2000s, when a whole group of technologies and applications were referred to as ‘the Internet’ (always capitalised) as though they were a single entity.

It’s notable that the abaucin study didn’t refer even once to ‘artificial intelligence,’¹ but used the somewhat more specific term ‘deep learning.’

When so many technologies, from large language models to recommendation engines to deep learning algorithms to theoretical artificial general intelligence systems are all condensed into two letters—AI—it doesn’t aid understanding. I’ve spoken to people this week who have interpreted the headlines around this to mean that something akin to ChatGPT has synthesised a new antibiotic on request—an understandable misunderstanding.

When scientists are warning about AI threatening the future of humanity, they aren’t talking about chatbots—yet you’d be hard-pressed to discern that from breathless headlines that refer to anything and everything as simply ‘AI’. In just a handful of days, even the well-respected BBC News website has published articles with headlines referencing ‘AI’ about drone aircraft, machine learning, delivery robots and image generation: all entirely different applications of a very broad class of technology.

If we’re to have sensible conversations about the ethics and regulation of AI technologies, I think there’s much to be done to try to help the public understand what exactly is being discussed. That ought to be the job of the news. Currently, it feels like we’re stuck in a cycle of labelling things as ‘AI’ as a strategy to garner attention, leading to conflated ideas and complete misunderstanding.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney, whose idea of the appearance of a human brain seems sketchier that I might have imagined.

1. Though, in fairness, the press release did. ↩

I don’t watch Britain’s Got Talent—Simon Isn’t Interested—but I’m aware from the press coverage that it was won by Viggo Venn, who did a number of comedy routines involving high visibility jackets. I’m surprised that I’ve yet to see even a single think-piece drawing a comparison between the popularity of these comedy antics and the gilets jaunes_ protests.

This seems like fertile ground for an idioticly impassioned opinion piece from either end of the political spectrum. Yet—for reasons unknown—even the most disreputable columnists seem to have failed to scrape this nugget from the bottom of their commentary barrels.

People have said for years that Britain’s Got Talent is on the wane, while its viewing figures have certainly tumbled from the early days, I would have said that it remained part of the wider cultural conversation. It seemed much the same as This Morning: while competitor programmes attract much greater numbers of viewers, it retains a grip on the cultural consciousness.

But this year, I haven’t heard anyone talk about it, and wasn’t even really aware that it was happening—and now its open goal for tedious political commentary has been left untouched.

Perhaps it really is over.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Earlier this year, I recommended one of the books by Dr Gavin Francis, a Scottish GP.

Today, I’m recommending his recent article in 1843 Magazine which describes the ongoing collapse of the NHS. It’s heartbreaking.

Imagine that your bank has made an error and erased all records of your assets. Your life is—at least temporarily—devastated. You complain, trying to unravel exactly what’s happened. However, you hit a brick wall when the bank’s senior leaders reveal that they’re not entirely sure what transpired because the issue was discussed via WhatsApp with ‘disappearing messages’ turned on. No permanent records of the conversation were kept.

Imagine that your relative dies in hospital due to a rumoured policy that patients in their condition will not receive treatment. An investigation is launched. It reaches no firm conclusions: the discussions about your relative occurred via WhatsApp, intermingled with messages about children’s piano lessons, and it is deemed in appropriate to disclose those private conversations.

Imagine that you were arrested by the police and detained for 72 hours, without ever truly knowing why. You complain. You are informed that no-one is precisely clear why you were detained: the officers in charge raised concerns with their superiors via WhatsApp, but nobody can recall the specifics, and the phone with the messages on it has broken.

In all of these cases, I imagine you would be outraged. Your outrage would probably be directed at the lack of permanent, contemporaneous records of both the decisions and the processes through which they were made. You’d likely consider the fact that WhatsApp was used to make the decisions as strange and inappropriate, but perhaps a second-order issue.

In the context of the covid inquiry, there is a lot in the press about WhatsApp messages. Their use in Government is frequently defended based on ‘efficiency’. I am concerned that they are only really more efficient because they circumvent processes seen as bureaucratic but which are fundamental to good Government, like contemporaneous record-keeping.

I think the press underplays this issue because they don’t see it: WhatsApp is commonly used within journalism, and for communications between politicians and journalists, so journalists are hindered in being able to take a step back and see the bigger picture of how inappropriate this is.

Take a step even further back and there’s a failure that underlies scores of recent Government scandals, from Partygate, to Richard Sharp, to Matt Hancock’s resignation, to Suella Braverman’s speeding course: the pathological inability of senior politicians to separate their professional roles from their personal lives. I have some sympathy with this, given how all-consuming some senior roles can be, but this ought to lead to particular effort to impose professional boundaries: I see no evidence of this.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Concern seems to be escalating about the ability of artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or generate misleading images and videos, and the potential for those creations to spread misinformation. Examples of potential alarming scenarios being reported based on this sort of stuff are emerging with increasing frequency.

Nevertheless, I’m reasonably relaxed about this. I believe—perhaps naively—that we are merely witnessing the latest stage of a long period of refining our relationship with visual media.

Our relationship with photos and videos remains quite new, and is constantly evolving. The principle of ‘seeing is believing’, in photographic terms, is a fairly new concept—and has probably never quite been true.

In the fairly recent past, photos and videos were a rare commodity. Television broadcasting of the proceedings in the House of Commons began only within my lifetime. Easy access to digital photography, including among professionals, is an even more recent development. Full-colour newspaper supplements, brimming with photographs, also materialised during my lifespan. In fact, I was attending university before the first full-colour newspapers appeared.

The rise of Photoshop made us doubt the veracity of photographs we were seeing. The Guardian initially banned digitally altered photographs, and amended its Editorial Code in 2011 to allow them only if explicitly labelled as such.

The advent of mobile photography and social media revolutionised our relationship with photography all over again, as Nathan Jurgenson has compellingly argued. Jurgenson’s work is especially apposite here, in fact, as he argues that photographs rarely stand alone these days, but form part of larger conversations. A faked image has less impact in that context.

There’s an argument that in rapidly developing situations, fake photos can have an outsized impact. But that is only true while we are in the temporary, short-lived, and rapidly eroding cultural moment when we assume photographs are accurate representations of events.

Increasingly convincing fake imagery simply teaches us to be more sceptical of what we think we are seeing. It’s another step down a road leading us away from a very recent, and very temporary, and very limited assumption that imagery can tell an accurate story.

Just as we’ve all learned over millennia to be sceptical of hearsay in the heat of the moment, so we’ll come to be sceptical that photos show a true picture.

We’re in a uniquely precarious cultural moment right now, while we’re still coming to terms with this change. But long term, this all simply leads us to fall back on the things we’ve always fallen back on.

We trust the sources we trust because we judge them to be trustworthy. Shortcuts to that conclusion—like the implied authority of appearing on television or having a ‘verified’ status on social media—unfailingly turn out to be temporary and misleading. We don’t believe news stories solely because of the pictures—there often aren’t pictures.

Part of being human is working out who and what is trustworthy. We get it wrong sometimes, and that’s part of being human too. But it’s a skilled honed over the whole of evolution, and we’re pretty darn good at it—photos or no photos.

The images in this post were generated by Midjourney.

Wendy and I have both enjoyed watching Ted Lasso, the not-really-about-football comedy drama series which reached its conclusion¹ after 34 episodes this week.

The prevailing opinion seems to be that it was a programme that found an audience during covid because of its warm-hearted nature, but which went off the boil thereafter, and most especially so in its final season. Many have commented that the expansion from 20-ish minute episodes to 80-ish minute marathons served the show poorly.

I disagree. I enjoyed the series from start to finish. It’s not one that will live long in my memory nor that I feel especially attached to, but it was good, heartwarming fun.

I’ve previously called Ted Lasso ‘a bit silly and sentimental, and therefore perfect’ and I think that aligns with my overall impression.

1. Apparently. If a spin-off called ‘The Richmond Way’ isn’t announced in the coming weeks, I shall be surprised. ↩

This book was a 2019 bestseller, which has since been adapted into a TV series. It’s author, Brodesser-Akner, is a celebrated writer of magazine features.

It took me over a month to plough through this. I didn’t exactly dislike it—it had some sparkling writing, and some great one-liners—but I didn’t feel particularly engaged, nor did I develop any emotional attachment to the characters.

The novel is set in New York, and initially focuses on Toby Fleishman, a hepatologist in his 40s who is estranged from his wife, Rachel. Early one morning, she drops their two kids off with him, and then disappears from their life.

The novel is oddly structured. The narration for the greater part of the book is told from Toby’s perspective, but by a named third-party narrator, Libby. Later in the book, Libby also narrates from Rachel’s perspective, and from her own perspective. This doesn’t seem to add much, but does make things unnecessarily confusing at times.

I didn’t really find myself drawn into this book. Unusually, I am quite interested to see how it translates to television, so I might seek that out at some point. But really, this book just didn’t resonate with me.

A few highlighted passages:

In the park, the beautiful young people—they were all beautiful, even if they weren’t—would be lying out on blankets even this early, their heads tilted up toward the sun. Some of them were sleeping. Back when Rachel consented to go on long walks with him, they would make fun of the sleeping people in the park. Not the homeless people, or the strung-out ones. Just the ones who’d made their way over to the park in their sweatpants, laid out their blankets, and pretended that the world was a safe place that only wanted you to be well rested. Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park in Manhattan; the anxiety was a thing they had in common to the end.

His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She’d apparently gotten three strikes. “What a night,” she’d written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write “Enjoy this for now” or “All desire is death.” It was best to stay off Facebook.

He marveled for the millionth time that summer about how a person could be this miserable and bewildered, and this horny and excited, all at the same time. What a piece of work is man.

People who are good don’t need ambition. Success comes and finds them. See? Competence and excellence are rewarded for those who are competent and excellent.

“Marriage is like the board in that old Othello game,” he said as he ate a chicken breast baked dry, no added oil, please. “The board is overwhelmingly full of white discs until someone places enough black discs in enough of the right places to flip all the discs to black. Marriage starts out full of white discs. Even when there are a few black ones on the board, it’s still a white board. You get into a fight? Ultimately fine and something to laugh at in the end, because the Othello board is still white. But when it finally happens and the black discs take over—the affair, the financial impropriety, the boredom, the midlife crisis, whatever it is that ends the marriage—the board becomes black. Now you look at the marriage, even the things that were formerly characterized as good memories, as tainted and rotted from the start: That adorable argument on the honeymoon was actually foreshadowing; the battle over what to name Hannah was my way of denying her the little family she had. Even the purely good memories are now haunted by a sense that I was a fool to allow myself to think that life was good and that a kingdom of happiness was mine.” (I told him I understood his metaphor, but also that’s not how you play Othello.)

Toby left the room and found his fellows right outside the door, waiting for him. “What is wrong with you all?” he asked. They looked surprised.

“Dr. Fleishman?” Logan asked. Joanie and Clay looked at each other.

“You were making notes while that man was crying.” Toby began walking and they followed, but then he stopped and turned to face them. “You have to look these people in the eye. This isn’t organs. This is people.” He kept walking and arrived at his office. “The people who come to you—they’re not here for checkups. By the time they get to you, they know something is wrong. They’re sick. They’re afraid. Do you know how scary it is for a body you’ve had your whole life to suddenly turn on you? For the system you relied on to just break down like that? Can you just close your eyes and try to think what that might feel like?” He was filled with disgust for the three of them and the way they looked bewildered. “Maybe you should all go into surgery if you hate people who are awake so much.” He walked into his office and before he closed his glass door, he said, “I’m very disappointed.”

“It seems so clear to me,” she’d said, “that the ocean would rather you didn’t surf on it. If it wanted you, it would give you a more sustained wave.”

“I think that’s the point,” he’d said. They were sitting on the bench on their balcony, she upright and he lying down, his legs crossed over her lap.

I’m grateful to Newcastle City Library for lending me their copy of this book to read.

Charlie Warzel argued this week that

Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.

He points out that

In just a few months, Musk has actively worked to elevate a particular right-wing, anti-woke ideology. He has reinstated legions of accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules and has emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants.

I’m not on Twitter, and so have nothing to measure this up against. But I’d observe that we’ve seen lots of large media organisations exit the platform recently.

Hypothetically, I don’t think I could imagine a caption on the BBC’s flagship television news programme promoting their political editor’s Truth Social profile, if such a thing were to exist. Is it reasonable for them to continue to promote Twitter like that?

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.