TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* The Ass-inine Report ft. Seamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Seamus Malekafzali returns to the show to talk to us about a report into the BBC’s reporting by a law firm that alleges the organisation is not sympathetic enough to Israel… but don’t worry about the report being biased, they used ChatGPT! Also, we talk about Elon Musk’s blanketing South Memphis in methane gas, and look at executive misbehaviour at Neom (which, wouldn’t you know it, is a kind of French Foreign Legion for senior businesspeople who are unhireable anywhere else). Get the full episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112015355 *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour Here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

We use chat GPT to determine that you're being mean to Israel and you need to stop. We found a use case for AI, which is doing PR for Israel. I would hope that no one would have to use an AI to work out that I'm being mean to Israel. But you know, if people want to duplicate their labor. This is someone who also has been like complaining to the BBC's guy Trevor Aster said he's been complaining to the BBC for years. He has just one guy. Well, he owns a law firm. He runs a law firm that's based in London and Tel Aviv. And, you know, he's he loves complaining about the BBC.

He's been doing it for decades. And so he says the Asterson report analyzed the BBC's coverage during the four month period beginning October 7th, a team of 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists contributed to the research, which used AI to analyze nine million words of BBC output, identifying one thousand five hundred and fifty three breaches of editorial guidelines regarding impartiality, accuracy, etc. etc. Yeah. And so what this basically means is that they put a bunch of articles to chat GPT and they said, hey, how many times is the term war crime used regarding Israel rather than Hamas? How many times is the term genocide used in regards

to Israel versus Hamas? Do they consider that this might correlate to the number of war crimes committed by each? Yeah, no, no. Okay, okay. No, no, no, no, no, not at all. It's because actually, if you paid attention to the facts, then you would know that nothing the IDF has done as a war crime. What you saw were a bunch of TikToks that got out of hand. Yeah. Also, men's mental health, like that seems to be like a go-to case for us. Like,

oh, they're just, they're doing it as like a trauma response. I'm generally sympathetic to men's mental health, including wearing women's clothing, but I don't think that you have to do it from people that you've killed. The data analysis team conducted an experiment to analyze the convoluted and ambiguous language. So basically they took all the BBC web articles within the reporting time frame and asked chatGPT4, so they didn't use the free version 3.5, if either Israeli or Palestinian casualties are mentioned in the article, and if so, how many?" Lyle Do we think that might correlate to the number

of casualties? Jason Well, I guess in order to be impartial in terms of an even- handed discussion as though everyone was suffering as much as everyone else, you would need to assume that each Israeli life is worth like hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian lives, which is again, like that is sort of what they're asking. I think that's what they're asking the BBC to please replicate. It's hey, we're worth more than them.

Can you please be reflected in the BBC's output? And then they would say in parallel, they used expert readers who assigned the task of finding the real numbers mentioned in each side. And then basically they would find the discrepancy between the two methods. Real numbers? What the fuck does real numbers mean? What source do they apply to that? What the IDF said, I imagine. So lastly, they measured the discrepancy. So they use chat GBT four for three reasons. First is unbiased.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, great start. for three reasons. First, it is unbiased. It's an unbiased proxy for the casual everyday audience for news that does not have an opinion on the conflict. So it's like, yeah, chat GPT, it's completely unbiased. It's just been trained on everything that's ever been written. That's unbiased. Of course. None of that could ever have been biased. And if it was, it averages out. Yeah. It couldn't be though, like there is systematic bias that is, that is just like

here in sheer weight of text. Secondly, it is unaware of the purpose of the experiment at hand. That's what, that's how a computer works. Yeah. Yeah. We could trust this calculator cause it doesn't know I'm using it to try to write boobs. Finally, finally, and most importantly, Chad GPT reads the text as given without drawing implicit conclusions. No it fucking doesn't! Like all of these things could just as well apply to a Fisher Price toy abacus.

Thus, the numbers it extracts in the text reflect a proxy for the casualty numbers that are reported in a straightforward manner or face value, but they also look at word use. So for example, the way a casualty is described can evoke a range of emotions, including building positive emotions such as compassion, empathy or sympathy by using descriptive or familial words such as mother, young child or elderly grandfather. But that's a factual detail too. Well, the facts are biased against Israel. All these facts are very biased against Israel. Sure. Instead of grandmother, you should have used the word terrorist, I suppose. Essentially, yeah, more or less. You should have used grand militant.

Does it flag terrorist as a similarly biased term in the report? So they building negative emotions such as anger and resentment can be used through descriptive words such as soldier or attacker due to the intentional active involvement of a conflict or a casualty as an act of a soldier or attacker. So basically, if you describe a soldier as killing an elderly grandmother, that's biased against the country that said the soldier. Because the soldier is also someone's child. Mason- What you mean is that a son and brother killed a Hamas associated grand militant. Yeah, I mean, actually what they want is to say that every IDF soldier is, in fact, a

remarkable young man. Essentially. Yeah, kind of. They sought to use chat GPT to see if such descriptions by the BBC were more used to describe the deaths of Palestinians or Israelis, indicating a potential indication of bias. Genuinely. Genuinely. They were like, yeah, if you say that all these soldiers killed all these grandmothers, you're being biased and we use an AI to tell us that.

ALICE This is such an exercise in futility too, because anyone who cares to pay the smallest amount of attention, it's immediately obvious what's happening and who's doing what to whom. And to then go in with your, as I say, your Fisher Price toy abacus and count which side gets the mean words, is just like, who is this for? Who is going to be convinced by this? It's just this attempt to AI generate another kind of smear to throw at the BBC. KM Also, I don't doubt the cynicality of this, of the original creator of this report. Obviously, it's incredibly cynical, but also it smacks of the perception that I think Americans, when polled, I think a

lot of them believe that Israelis and Palestinians in this war have been killed in equal measure. When in fact, after October 7th, one side has absolutely had far more casualties applied to it, even by whatever source you're going by. But if you, I guess, complain to the PVC about how many times they're mentioning Palestinian casualties, then you can plant that seed of distrust. Why aren't you talking about, oh, these Israelis are getting killed? I see this as part of a much longer campaign by various pressure groups, not just pro-Israel groups, but anybody on the right to essentially constantly create internal crises at the BBC where it asks itself of its two left wing.

Just looking, grabbing yourself by the lapels in the mirror and being like, am I a secret woke? Essentially, that's the idea is to manufacture a crisis, to let the BBC will be forced to like introspect and then decide to create and we'll talk about what they want at the end. But like I'll go back to what they were talking about. The other thing they did is they like in the reporting timeframe they looked at like every TV interview and then they were like, ah, you interrupted Elon Levy 11 times.

Fuck off. Yeah. You can, you can scroll to the point. They were like, they, they, they had a whole part that was like, oh yes, Elon Levy, pro-Israel. They literally transcribed part of an interview with him where they've gone like, that's a mean question. Yes, essentially. They say, hostile opening question, plays video of South Africa lawyer at ICC who claimed Israel committing genocide. Her opening question is just, all of that is true, isn't it?

I guess it's assumptive in the sense that what she's talking about is indeed true. I guess she didn't give him the benefit of the doubt just by asking, like, can you respond to this? I don't even know. Like, this is just what a reporter does to anyone. It's nothing. And it's Elon Levy. Elon Levy is not a likable man in like any respect. Have you seen him speak? This man is PR Poison.

Like we're counting number of interruptions and stuff. Like, people talk differently. Some people like talk over an interviewer. Like, it's nonsense to try and like draw much from this, you know? Like, you'll notice that like even during the like depths of the Corbyn years, right, when we were looking at a transparently unfair media, the shit we were teasing out about that was not like, they asked him a slightly unfair question, it was stuff like, oh they photoshopped him into like a Russian hat kind of thing. When the media is really determined to put its thumb on the scale, you don't have to look that hard. They'd say, oh yeah, well you didn't interrupt

the pro-Palestinian person quite so often. Yeah, so it's okay, you've been rude to Elon that hard. They'd say, oh yeah, well you didn't interrupt the pro-Palestinian person quite so often. Yeah, so it's okay, you've been rude to Elon Levy. They also talked about like the themes and some of the themes could be something like respect for Hamas and that's cashed out as, oh yeah, you said that their operation was like competent, but that means that you respect Hamas, essentially. As opposed to what we want you to say, which is these people are terrifying, but are also inept. They deserve both fear and derision, you could say. You know, but the other theme is they'd be like, Oh yeah, Palestinian suffering is mentioned far more frequently than Israeli suffering.

Cause there's far more of it. I'm not doing like fucking Amit the devourer weighing this shit up. You can measure the number of dead bodies. It's not like a, a sort of like a, you don't need to woke abacus for that. And they say oh yeah you haven't mentioned this did like economic damage to Israel. But self-inflicted! They're doing it, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm sorry you decided to build your entire economy on like soda streams and spyware, but like at what point is that my fault, you know?

But is that the argument that just like the self-inflicted economic damage that Israel has done to itself by deciding to like do a war on seven fronts and is still sort of hemorrhaging? Because they listened to that song, Seven Nation Army, and got really hyped up and like got a bit too into it. That's right. That's right. That's probably the best explanation.

But like, this is self-inflicted and like, again, I don't want to be one of those sort of like a hack that is like, oh, well, when the Russians did it. But like, yeah, when, when it happened in Russia and like the news was like, this is self-inflicted. And like, again, I don't want to be one of those sort of like a hack that is like, oh, well, when the Russians did it. But like, yeah, when it happened in Russia and like the news like, oh, like the Russian economy is kind of like on the brink of collapse or sort of like not in a particularly good place because it has basically decided to continue a war that is like economically damaging and demographically damaging. Like this was sort of presented at the very least as being like a fairly neutral observation. It's like when will Putin run out of road now that he's had to nationalize McDonald's or whatever. Like this was sort of presented at the very least as being like a fairly neutral observation.

When will Putin run out of road now that he's had to nationalise McDonald's or whatever? Right. But it was also very much like, well, this is Putin's fault that, you know, he's sort of mobilised the country to sort of be a war economy and using a, you know, and kind of a lot of young men are dying in the process. But in the case of Israel, where like basically the same thing is happening. So the argument, the point was like, was the argument that Israel, where basically the same thing is happening. So the point was the argument that Hamas is actually doing the damage and therefore that's how it should be framed?

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