188: Entirely Artificial Intelligence

0:00Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the iSummer studio with Adam McQueen, Ian Hislop and Matt Muir. We're here to discuss the events of the last week since the last edition of the magazine came out and we thought we'd start off with one which has been all over the news. It's the story of the Kruker Gazette and the personal people behind it. So this is an online comedy account which is mostly consisting of AI videos and the people behind it have been in the news. but it turns out we're already familiar with them.

0:34Aren't we, Matt? We are. So I got interested in the Crew Cone Gazette in November of, sort of, during the summer last year, and mainly because I kept on seeing these videos kind of floating around, and various elements of the right-wing press saying laudatory things about, as you point out, this new frontier of satire. And I was just curious as to what was going on, who the people behind it were, and questions of that ilk. And I dropped them a line in November asking if they'd be willing to answer some questions. and they responded saying they would be perfectly happy to answer questions, but they were very keen on preserving their anonymity because we live in a climate that is dangerous for free speech in Britain, as I'm sure we can all attest to.

1:10Private eye, you know, anonymous, fair enough. Yeah, exactly. You can't, you're absolutely fine to be anonymous if you so desire. But I was curious as to the motivation behind it and also fundamentally how they were funding a lot of this because, you know, making AI videos isn't free and the better they are, the more they cost, you know, the tokens cost money, et cetera. And so I just wanted to get a little bit of insight into that. And over the course of these conversations, I got the vague impression there was something a little bit odd about the whole operation. I couldn't necessarily pinpoint exactly why, but the man behind the account who styled himself crewkern man and who appeared in various videos wearing a sort of Make America Great Again style cap with a very heavy beard and aviator sunglasses, often AI generated videos themselves.

1:51He had spoken about having spent time in America, getting in with a crypto crowd. And I was getting curious as to what his beliefs were and why exactly, despite the fact that he said that he was very much in terms of in favour of satire and making fun of everybody. Why specifically all of the videos that he put out were kind of pro-reform and Tories and very much knocking anybody on the left. I'm just curious as to what all that was about. Anyway, digging around. And then over Christmas, we completely coincidentally got a tip off from somebody who lived in Kruker and saying that, oh, by the way, the blokes are convicted Nazi.

2:20Adam, I believe, has the full rap sheet over there. Yeah, it's quite a long one. Yeah, it involved, you can read, actually, if you just Google this, the sentencing remarks from the last time he was sent to prison on the 8th of December 2016 by Mr Justice Spencer. That was for the cruel campaign of vile racist abuse against Luciana Berger, the Labour MP. But it also was on top of six offences of sending malicious communications and offensive harassment, all arising from false and hateful allegations against innocent members of the public that they were paedophiles. And there was an incident as well where he effectively made up a story about a pub which was banning members of the armed forces.

2:56And that resulted in that pub having to close and then death threats and arson threats being made against that pub. It was just sort of fantasy in his head. Now, we should probably say at this point that Joshua Bonehill-Payne says he's now a reformed character and he greatly regrets all of this. And he has done his time in prison. But you actually put a question directly to him, didn't you, in December? I did, yeah. So we got this tip off and I sent the person to whom I've been corresponding, the self-styled crewkern man who had said that he'd been communicating with me throughout this time. Are you Joshua Bonehill-Payne?

3:26Because we have received reports that you are. And he said that he categorically denied that the person I was corresponding with was Joshua Bonehill-Payne, which obviously wasn't true or hadn't been true previously. I had to correct you on your own question. What you actually asked him, because this is going to be important, was we have heard that the person behind the Crewcone Gazette is one Joshua Bonehill-Payne, previously convicted of incitement to racial hatred and racially aggravated harassment. But you were conversing with the Crewcone man. You asked if the person behind the website who identified as the Crewcone man was Joshua Bonehill-Payne.

3:54Yes, and he said that he categorically denied that he was that person. And so, therefore, when we published this story, having myself gone down to Crewcone and received multiple confirmation from drunk people in pubs late one evening, that the person behind these videos very much was the same man that had been convicted twice of racial aggravated hatred. We printed the story, at which point we were subject to what our legal counsel described as a wonderful bit of chat GPT work. So, yeah, this was a letter suggesting that the eye had fundamentally misrepresented the facts of the case because the person who had been corresponding with me was not, in fact, Joshua Bonehill-Payne.

4:36It was the other person behind the Krukhang Gazette account. Also anonymous. Also anonymous. And offering no name or any evidence this person ever existed. But therefore that made our whole story completely unviable and therefore we owed him damages. I think we went back to him with a polite response, if I remember correctly. I think it wasn't Arkel versus Brechtstram. No, it was a moderate version of that. It was not a convincing legal letter. It was not a convincing legal letter. And fundamentally speaking, I think what's been interesting about the whole story and the subsequent he's going to become a councillor, oh no, he's not going to become a councillor, is that there is very little about the man in my correspondence with him that struck me as convincing.

5:15The arguments as to why he was doing satire were not convincing. His explanation as to the rationale for the satirical direction he was taking was not convincing. His subsequent video that he made when he knew he was about to be unmasked and he put a video on his YouTube channel saying who is the Krukhurn man and voluntarily unmasking himself in what... and I encourage readers to look this up because it's quite interesting, was a very, very, very bizarre AI-generated Q &A between an AI version of himself and an AI interlocutor. God knows why he chose to do that, but anyway, he did. It features multiple instances of him talking about how he was deradicalised in prison and how he underwent a variety of different home office mandated courses and has gone on to do training and workshops to speak about his own deradicalisation journey, which, let's be clear, is a good and positive thing.

6:03in the video that he put up explaining this he illustrated these with completely ai generated images of him standing in front of a lectern reading um basically it it misspelled the word anti-semitism it was that poor of an ai thing it used the logo of um an organization which doesn't appear to exist anywhere um i contacted the home office about this citing that specific organization that was in this video never heard of it we have never done any work with them i'm not suggesting that he hasn't done these courses in fact he's demonstrated proof of having certificates from prevent the certificates are from e-learning courses which are an introduction to prevent there's there's a lot of stuff here that i just find yes curious i think it's probably fair to say yes and and our first response was if you question a man and his first response is to send you a legal letter then maybe being an elected representative of the people in which you're supposedly accountable to the general public is not a good idea for you because even rehabilitated the first thing you want to do is shut down any questions about yourself.

7:06And that isn't good for local government or for a wider role, such as he now has. We're in an extraordinary situation where we can kind of say, putting aside the neo-Nazism, this man is still massively unsuitable for public office, aren't we? But that's not apparently the conclusion that Kemi Baden-Ock has got to. Well, this is the thing, because Kemi Baden-Ock has a different opinion, I think, of all of us. I think all of us acknowledge that councillors do a good and important job. Kemi Badenock said he would just be sorting out parking, looking at bins. Never mind the fact that this is what most people care about in their most immediate lives, and it's a sign of where the government is working, where the actual bins have been taken away and emptied.

7:45You know, that is... That's the point. You know, that's what people get most angry about. So she has decided that, no, the bar for being a councillor is different to being an MP. She specifically said, I have much higher threshold for what it takes to be a Conservative MP. but apparently not for a special advisor on rehabilitation and race issues which is what he's now been appointed to. And the interest, well, there are lots of interesting aspects here but the Times piece which was about the Crew-Coin Gazette saying how good the videos were from February. I'm sure the Times were not aware of any of the prison history and the neo-Nazi stuff but they pointed out that he just had a Christmas card from Cammy Badenov.

8:23So she clearly, I think, has questions to answer about her opinions on rehabilitation because they seem to be absolutely all over the place. Her main charge was that what people don't like is, I'm quoting here, hypocrisy where politicians ask for selective forgiveness for their own side while demanding tougher rules for their opponents. We should be tough enough to stand by our beliefs even when they are politically inconvenient, wise enough to recognise rehabilitation and consistent enough to apply the same principles to friend and foe. But I think the problem with this is that she has quite clearly shown a bit of favouritism towards someone on the Christmas card list.

9:00Or if you remember the story of Frank Hester, who made some really, really appalling racist comments about Diane Abbott, who had also donated 10 million quid to the Tories. When that story came up, she said, look, let's not go around looking for racism everywhere. The important thing is what's in someone's heart. Whatever. It's got no internal logic to it, unfortunately. I mean, I think it's also worth pointing out that Kemi Betanok is a terribly, horribly online human being. I would be willing to bet thinks that the output of the Krukhorn Gazette is exactly the sort of fast paced satirical communications appealing to young online people that the Conservative Party ought to be doing more of.

9:36And obviously, I don't want to suggest that the popularity of that channel and its content may have had any bearing on her and the party's decision to bring this man back into the fold again. But I'm also not not saying that. Making a passionate and earnest and committed case for rehabilitation is fine, but rehabilitation straight into public office, slightly different. No one is saying never give this man a job again. He shouldn't be allowed to go around telling people that anti-Semitism is a bad thing. All for all that. do we have to have him as an official at a local level? Probably not. If then he resigns under pressure, not saying everyone's got this all wrong, I really am a better human being, I would like to help.

10:24He resigns under pressure. You then appoint him as an advisor at a higher level. I mean, there are lots of jobs he could do, I am sure. Or does it have to be to do with the offences he committed? Long term, they are quite serious. And there are a lot of them. And they do involve violence. Is there not a job centre? I mean, does it have to be the Conservative Party? I'm afraid it's the last resort for the totally unemployable. That's the problem. It just seems like, I mean, you think all those many, many people who are lined up to be Conservative candidates in the next set of local elections, and who haven't yet had to step down, what are they going to make of that?

11:04That was a hell of a kick of the teeth from all the people who are actually going to be out and shoving the leaflets through boxes and campaigning for you, isn't it? It's such an extraordinary way to treat your own supporters. So if you go back and look at the videos that the Crew Kern Gazette has put out, which unfortunately I have done, it's only been going for a year. It started producing these AI-generated satirical pieces in about May of 2025. and over the course of last summer it was featured lots and lots and lots of very pro Nigel Farage videos making Nigel Farage look very cool uh lots of stop the boats rhetoric and narrative lots of stuff about corruption under labor and how Keir Starmer was weak and ineffectual and then basically since about February there has been a fairly fairly big shift towards pro-Kami Baden-Ock pro conservatism but apparently he was also being courted last year by reform because he had previously applied to them to be a councillor and they got back in touch with him saying we've got spaces he apparently went through vetting and in november of last year it's a big thing yeah so but can we better not did say that the vetting procedure that um the other parties were using the green party reform party was very very poor and there was a higher standard so it doesn't look like it does it i mean there are questions to be asked i suppose the thing that the thing that i find particularly interesting about this in terms of extremism now let's be very very clear antisemitism is a terrible thing and it is good and proper to be stood up to and stamped out what i do find curious though is that throughout all of this obviously he has his he served jail time for incitement to racial hatred and antisemitism he's also done been convicted twice and served community service for other racially aggregated offenses so um adam mentioned the full story about the pub banning service people the code to that story was that The pub allegedly banned service people because they didn't want to offend migrants.

12:55That was specifically... That's the version he was putting out. That was the version that he was putting out. This man has a long and storied track record of being an all-purposes troll and specifically has also directed quite a lot of fairly vile racism and misinformation towards the Muslim community. And again, after he was unmasked, he did a surprisingly long and surprisingly in-depth interview with the Times of Israel, which, by the way, also called him Britain's premier satirist. sorry Ian, where as evidence of his increasingly philo-Semitic views he posited that a lot of the evidence that has been cited by organizations such as the UN for Israeli war crimes in Gaza was the result of Hamas manufacturing evidence using artificial intelligence and he would know because he's an AI specialist.

13:43Again I would question whether or not that statements of that ilk make someone suitable to be an elected councillor. And on a general issue of rehabilitation, Kemi Baden-Ock is unforgiving of those who have suggested that net zero might eventually be a good idea. They're not allowed in the party. I mean, disrepetable figures such as Grant Shapps, who was in the cabinet until the last election, and Gavin Barwell as well, Theresa May's top advisor. They're now not welcome in the Conservative fold because they're they don't agree with things that came to us. For those of us with a slightly longer memory, you think of Profumo.

14:23His rehabilitation was doing charity work in the East End for about four decades, and he was eventually allowed back. There was some long-term evidence that he regretted his actions and he wanted to be a better person. I think it's quite quick to allow someone to run for public office after crimes of this magnitude. I think that is not unfair. There are also some remarkable inconsistencies in some of the accounts that he's given over the course of the past week about his rehabilitative journey. There's one interview he was quoted in the BBC as saying that it was the murder of Joe Cox that first set him on the path to deradicalisation because he realised that, you know, fomenting hate had potentially very serious consequences.

15:04Joe Cox was murdered in the summer of 2016. he was then tried for the Luciana Berger offences and sentenced in December of 2016 during which sentencing the judge remarked upon him smirking throughout the trial and Luciana Berger herself has said that he directed an anti-Semitic gesture towards the public gallery during that trial which suggests that maybe that Damascene moment post the murder of Joe Cox possibly wasn't necessarily strictly accurate or that he has misremembered the chronology that's a fair interpretation so section two of the podcast ian has regenerated as helen hello hello helen lewis helen you've seen the internet this in the last week i stared into the dark heart of the internet one of the physical bits of the internet can you tell us what's going on yeah since we last spoke i've been in michigan and wisconsin which are ground zero for the resistance to data centers essentially particularly the big ai companies and cloud computer companies need rack after rack of server and these very high spec chips and they have to be single story buildings which means that the campuses are massive the one that i went to in uh eastern michigan is 250 acres which is huge over a million square feet when it's um when it's finished it's a single building single that's a that's a kind of campus there's a couple of i think there's three main buildings but it's just these huge huge luckily america is very big but uh otherwise there'd be real problems all the insights on this podcast america is very big people i want to check i want to break it down even more when i asked chat gpt to make me a dreadful video yes is this the building where it gets made really yes your request will probably get sent to the one this particular one um is being used for oracle which is larry ellison's company and then open ai sam altman's company so yeah when you ask chat gpt you know how magnet work then it will go and then it will come back to you here And it will use also about as much energy as one nuclear reactor can supply.

17:05That's the other thing about these. The water usage of them used to be a huge problem. It's become a smaller problem. But the energy usage is huge. The demand on the grid. Some of these are using like 10 % of the grid demand in the place where they currently are. So they're these huge infrastructure projects. They've become a huge issue in the midterm elections, which are coming up in November, because essentially about 70 % of people are against them. NIMBYism is a very potent force in politics as we previously discussed and there are lots of farmers who basically say I don't want a possibly noisy, not very many jobs, very energy draining eyesore on my land and then there's this other thing going on too which is these are, as you say, the first physical manifestation of the modern internet and it turns out that a lot of people don't like the modern internet and they certainly don't like the big men who are behind the modern internet And this is a kind of physical way of saying, no, I don't like it.

17:59I don't trust you. And so the resistance to them has been huge. A couple of states have already declared moratoriums. One candidate for governor in Wisconsin is running on a moratorium. And even Vivek Ramaswamy, who you may remember, he was going to be the other half of Doge until Elon Musk went, mine, mine. He lasted about a week, didn't he? He was almost trust-like in his brief... Was he the first thing that Elon Musk decided the government could do without the expense of? He's running for governor of Ohio as a Republican, and he's now come to this thing saying, actually, these data centres, until they give everyone around them free electricity, we should have a moratorium on them.

18:34It's very difficult now in lots of states where they're being built. About 1 ,400 built in the US last year. Yeah, there was a story this morning I saw. There are, I think, 500 bans now currently in operation across different states in the US, different counties deciding unilaterally that they're going to try and put limits on the construction, whether banning them outright or stipulating that there have to be certain kickbacks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to work out sometimes whether the numbers are large or small. As in 1 ,400 of them being built sounds like an enormous number. But in terms of overall electricity usage, I think it's going to be about 1.5%.

19:06But then in America, it could be going from 5 % of electricity to 10 % by 2030, which suddenly does sound like quite a substantial number. For something that didn't functionally exist five years ago. It's extraordinary. The footprint of these is enormous. And the fact is that essentially the seven big tech companies have been, with their capital expenditure on these. All those stock market prices you've seen, that has been driven by this. They are spending billions. I mean, actually, possibly maybe even trillions on this in the next couple of years. I think one of the things that's important to remember is that we don't know how much energy these things use.

19:36We simply don't, because none of these companies have a duty to sell us. There are figures buried in projection. So, for example, Google has said that it is unlikely to be able to meet environmental commitments that it made a decade ago, because year on year its energy consumption has gone up by 38%. Now, they don't have to specify that that's because of AI or how much of that, but, you know, the likelihood is, et cetera. But it's not because of making those extra Google of the day things. No, it's all about that. Every time you click on the funny logo and you see the nice animation, it kills a tree.

20:05But, again, the same thing for water. So there are no official statements for how much water these things require because, obviously, the technology changes and it's improving and it's less than it used to be. But there were court documents filed in Virginia earlier this year between Google and this particular county. for the potential construction of a set non-specified number of data centres, which projected water usage of between two and eight million gallons a day of drinking water. And this is a huge deal in America, particularly the sort of western parts of America, which are basically desert.

20:35I mean, there are legal battles that have been going on for decades over whether California is stealing Nevada's water. Yeah, and the Colorado River level has been falling and falling and falling. Water politics is a huge deal in America. But you're right, and they're spread out often across more permissive states or more farm-based states, but essentially there have been lots of pockets of local resistance. And because there's this America, this is playing out through lawsuits, which is good news for journalists because it means there are lots of documents to look at. The New York Times had a great story from Louisiana, and this actually reminded me of a big steroidal American version of Teesside, the great private eye story of Richard Brooks, because Facebook's parent company was asking local officials not only for a tax break to be smuggled through in a bill that was about fibre optic cables, but also making local officials sign non-disclosure agreements.

21:20Because essentially the bet from all of these tech companies, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, is that there aren't going to be that many winners, right? And they're particularly worried about that China will be the winner. So everybody is racing to build as much compute as they can, as quickly as they can, and trying to just ram things through. Which is funny to me because I went and thought, I wonder if this is happening in Britain. And all of our ones are like, we're going to have a£10 billion one that's going to start building next year and be finished by 2030. and you're like, who knows if there'll even be an internet or a human race by then?

21:51That's the American calculation. Build it now, now, now. I mean, Zuckerberg's point is interesting. He published an open letter about his vision for the future of AI overnight, which is basically him saying, no, it's all going to be open source because he doesn't think that Meta is going to win the frontier model battle. And so now he's going, well, no, we're going to make it open to everyone because this is a good that has to recruit a humanity. Yes, I don't want to compete with Open Eye and Anthropic because I think they'll win. Yes, exactly that. Why don't we all just play nicely together? But there was a large swathe of that, which is about data centres.

22:19And he speaks about them as a public good that we should all embrace and posits that in the future they'll be great for people because local areas, whether it be counties or states in the US, will be able to extract tax revenue from tech companies. So that'll make it OK. And he also commits that by 2030, all of Meta's data centres will put more water back into the system than it will extract, which I'm guessing is going to be via the purchasing of water credits, which are probably going to be like carbon credits, which, as we all know, are definitely not bollocks. I mean, technically they could do that by just being neutral and then, like, Mark Zuckerberg having a whittle in a local river.

22:55That's a free one out there for you, Mark, if you want to take that. Also, sorry, going on about the tax revenue. I mean, Facebook famously, they're so keen to pay more tax, aren't they? They're constantly lobbying the government to pay more tax. It's property taxes. That's the way lots of these things work. So the one I was reporting on in Michigan has pledged a load of upfront money for the local fire department, for example, $7 million for that. But also they reckon we'll be paying, even with the very healthy tax break they've been after, about$100 million a year in property taxes. A, what's interesting to me about it is that people don't believe that that money will ever come.

23:23It's not like they've just gone, well, that sounds a lot of money. Yes, please. They're like, well, hang on a minute, you wouldn't be offering us that much money unless you were about to do something really shady. And just this low level of institutional trust that they'll ever see the money or if something goes wrong, as you say, with the water table, that they have any recourse. So it has become this very physical manifestation of people's feeling that there are these huge, almost supranational organisations that are basically unaccountable to anybody. And what they also don't have is the usual payoff with this kind of thing, which is employment locally, is it?

23:54Because if you get an enormous Amazon warehouse or a mine or something else that's going to blight your landscape, you do get an awful lot of local jobs. And that's not the case with these. I mean, they're pretty much self-sustaining once they're up and running, aren't they? They talk a lot about the construction jobs that will be, and that's true. The one in Michigan is claiming thousands of construction jobs. And then they say about 450 jobs. But it's very hard to see long term, given that the problem is that the AI industry has been ruined by its own rhetoric, which was like jobs, you won't need jobs, there won't be any jobs, we'll just be robots.

24:22So understandably, people think, well, maybe you'll have like a night watchman and, you know, someone like dusting. But it's not going to be highly skilled, well paid jobs. You know, it's interesting. Some places have accepted them. There's a town in Maine that has basically ruined the Democratic governor's plans for a moratorium because they want one in their town. And the reason they want one is because there used to be a paper mill there that exploded accidentally. And this is now going to be redeveloped as an AI data center. But that's another part of the story that you're talking about bits of America that de-industrialized in ways, particularly the Midwest, that were really painful.

24:56There was a car plant that employed loads of people and that was gone. and they wonder whether or not is this like the phoenix rising from the flames or is this just another thing that's going to come along and then leave us in the lurch again so i just think it's become this real rallying cry in in quite a lot of states actually would anyone like to put the the bull case for these things i mean okay so a bull case if you listen to google the reason that we need the ai and the reason we don't have to worry about the environmental impact of the ai is because the environmental problem is going to be sold by the ai the ai oh wonderful the other The notable case is that your pension, if you have one, has gone up extraordinarily on the back of the US stock market.

25:35And these companies, the tech firms, are really the only big growth area. Although it's also entirely possible that a good two-thirds of them are going to fall very, very, very flat. It does feel very much like the dot-com bubble of 2000, doesn't it? It's interesting. I've gone back and forth on AI as a bubble. I don't know if you have. And I think it's both incredibly useful and there are bits of it that are very bubbly. I think there are two things that are true in parallel here. Firstly, that the technology is transformative, it does work, and it is going to change the world, and it's going to disrupt it in ways that we can't possibly foresee, and also that it's not going away.

26:08And secondly, that a lot of the financing around it is dodgy as all hell, and a lot of it is going to fall apart, leaving a lot of very, very burned fingers significantly in investment and pension funds, potentially. Isn't this part of what happened with the dot-com bubble? A lot of people lost a lot of money. We all still use the internet now, you know. the dot-com bubble was built on technology that was fundamentally good it's just that people got over excited about its utility and mischaracterized it and that's kind of to a certain extent parallel to what is happening now the difference being that one might argue that ai is significant and transformative in ways far beyond that which the internet was well there we go if it's coming to the uk the good news is the uk has plenty of water to spare at the moment so that's at least one worry we can take off the table.

26:53Right, now let's come to the final story of this week. Weirdly, it slightly echoes the first story we did today about the Crew Cowan Gazette, but this one is about Jason Arday, who was Cambridge's youngest black professor when he was appointed in 2023, has just resigned over accusations of plagiarism and plenty more besides. This has become an enormous story, partly because it's August. It's a rollicking good yarn, though, as well. Got some extraordinary detail in there, hasn't it? So the moment that Carter Ruck entered the equation, I see all your little ears pricked up. Gloriously, alas, we had Carter Ruck and Jolly and Mormon, the Good Law Project, on the same side, which is the point at which I thought, oh dear.