A crisis of faith in politics

Although my mood is much less bleak than it was at the start of the year, I feel I am suffering a crisis of faith in politics. It was suggested to me before Christmas that maybe politics doesn’t work any more. Perhaps politicians cannot turn things around.

Although I was delighted that the UK elected a Labour government last summer, there were numerous and well documented missteps by Labour since then. The economy is growing, but barely – by 0.1% in the fourth quarter of last year. The NHS will take a lot of reform and, perhaps, cannot support the entirety of an ageing, growing UK population.

Since the result of the US election in November, I have been deliberately consuming less news including less politics. I no longer listen to the Today programme in the morning, waking to classical music and having breakfast and doing Wordle in silence before starting my day.

I did hear the dreadful exchanges at the White House last week between Presidents Trump and Zelenskyy and immediately wished I hadn’t heard them.

Let’s see how the year pans out. I’m still a believer in people coming together to solve problems, and maybe that can start to happen in politics again soon.

Meanwhile, I’m busy with comms for the Good Faith Partnership, Warm Welcome and, in my own time, Creative Cities Convention.

In other news

There was concerning research out last month from the BBC, reported by Press Gazette, suggesting most generative AI responses based on news content contain inaccuracies. Press Gazette reports the BBC saying it hopes tech titans including Google and Microsoft will hear journalists’ concerns and work constructively to rectify the issues.

Some communications professionals are concerned with avoiding cliché and overused tropes for images when illustrating articles about AI. I was alerted to this library of better images for AI, and it seems really useful. The consensus is that glowing brains and humanoid robots give a misleading picture of AI, which after all, as I understand it, consists of large language models similar to predictive text.

I’m also digesting the news that creatives are fighting government proposals on AI and copyright which would see creatives opt out of a process of having their copyrighted content mined by AI tools. Creatives are sceptical, saying they’re unlikely to be able to reserve their rights if AI tools are allowed to learn from copyright material.

The same day, Tuesday 25 February which was the last day of a government consultation on a proposal for a copyright exemption for AI companies, almost all the national newspapers carried the Make It Fair campaign on their front pages. It was an attempt to raise awareness of the proposed weakening of copyright law, allowing AI companies such as OpenAI to scrape UK content creators’ content unless they opt out.

Then the Guardian reported that ministers may offer some concessions to their plans to make it easier for AI tools to mine copyrighted material. Better news, if that happens.

That’s it for this month. Suddenly the weeks have started speeding up and it will be April before you know it.