Cheat Sheet | Russian spy ship, secret Ukraine peace deal and the AI nightmare for novelists

0:01Hello, you are listening to Cheat Sheet, the podcast that gets you up to speed with everything that's happening in just 10 minutes. I'm Sophie.

0:08Sophy Ridge:And I'm Wilf. It's Thursday, the 20th of November. Here's what's happening. So the UK is exploring military options. If a Russian spy ship sails any closer to British shores, we're going to explain what's happened in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, the US and Russia could be secretly forming a plan to end the war in Ukraine. and it is a nightmare to be honest for novelists. Nearly half of authors in the UK think they're going to be replaced by AI.

0:39Right, let's talk about the Russian ship off the coast of Scotland. The Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper says the government's deployed a Royal Navy warship and also RAF planes to keep an eye on what it's up to. It was spotted yesterday. what they suspected of doing is gathering intelligence to try and map Britain's undersea cables. The ship known as the Yantar is just off the north coast of Scotland at the minute and it was also seen pointing lasers at pilots of RAF aircraft. Let's listen to what the Defence Secretary had to say. He said the UK is exploring military options if it gets any closer to British shores and he did a press conference yesterday as the news broke and addressed the Kremlin.

1:21directly. My message to Russia and to Putin is this. We see you. We know what you're doing. And if the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready.

1:34Sophy Ridge:We are ready. It's pretty serious stuff. It's just on the edge of our territorial waters, but is in our economic waters. And I think, though, that what jumps out most of all the defence actually was saying is the laser that was used is a military grade laser, which is aiming to distract the pilots. It's not some child with a laser and something like that. And that's clearly very serious. As our security analyst, Michael Clarke, who I always look to at things like this, says, you know, this is very serious. We're right to be worried. As you said, we're ready, is the rhetoric. It came after yesterday, we talked about this report from the House of Commons that said we're not ready.

2:14Sophy Ridge:So I do think we're starting to see how real the threats are and how essentially urgent it is that this extra spending is spent well and efficiently on the type of threats we face today, which are changing, and that we do that with urgency. The difficulty is, John Healy says we're ready, but what are they actually going to do? Because any attack on this warship will be seen as a massive escalation with Russia, which I would imagine is not what they want to do. And if you look at what Russia is saying, they've denied spying. They've accused the British government of what they're describing as an escalation of militaristic hysteria and saying that actually there's nothing to see here.

2:52It's just, you know, oceanographic research vessel. Get over it.

2:56Sophy Ridge:At least it's not, you know, an armoured ship. So perhaps they could intervene and stop it as opposed to attack it. Hopefully it doesn't get to that. So sticking on the topic of Russia, Sophie, this is a really interesting story as it relates to Russia. Ukraine and potential attempts to find peace. So Steve Witkoff is Trump's special envoy for these sorts of peace negotiations. Yesterday, on social media, he reshared a report from the US news organization Axios, which suggested that secret negotiations between the US and Russia were happening again. And he started to type, he must have got this story from K.

3:39Sophy Ridge:the post was then deleted. So everyone thinks he was trying to send a private message not to do a post. They think Kay most probably is Kirill Dmitriev who has become Putin's unofficial envoy to Washington, kind of Wyckoff's opposite man. I can't actually get my head around the fact that this is quite a serious guy here, right? You know, he's doing an important job and he just sends something by mistake publicly that he meant for a direct message. I mean, what on earth? Well, what I find kind of confusing is he stopped short of finishing the message. Well, maybe K is like a slang, you know. Maybe K is slang.

4:16Is that how he calls them, like special K?

4:17Sophy Ridge:I mean, anyway, let's get the summary of what this all means from our Markstone. This plan at the heart of it would see the Donbass, that is the whole of the area to the east of Ukraine, being given over to Russia, even the 15 or so percent of land that is currently not held by Russia. And in return, there would be some sort of a security guarantee by the Americans. But as yet, we still don't have detail on what that security guarantee will be. The final piece of this jigsaw is that the Europeans, the Coalition of the Willing, which includes the British, were not privy to this plan and nor were the Ukrainians at the point at which it was drawn up.

4:53Sophy Ridge:If what's in this Axios report is true, as Mark was kind of alluding to, it's not a plan that on the face of it looks that fair to Ukraine. That said, President Zelensky, who's been in Turkey over the last couple of days, was speaking very warmly about President Trump and his efforts to find peace. So maybe more is happening behind the scenes. Maybe that's just Zelensky saying warm things to President Trump because he knows he has to either way. One to watch. So Donald Trump has gone and signed the bill, which means that he has given the green light to the release of all of the files relating to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

5:30We know, of course, and we've been talking about all week that US politicians have voted on it, passed it, but he's done it. So the I's been dotted, the T's been crossed by Donald Trump himself. So now the US Justice Department has got 30 days to release all the documents. And it's going to be loads of stuff, right? It is going to be an absolute trove of stuff. All the investigations, prosecutions, custodial matters, flight logs, immunity deals. I mean, there is an awful lot here. and I guess what everyone is waiting for is what on earth is in them and particularly is there going to be anything in them relating to Donald Trump himself

6:05Sophy Ridge:There's also, is there still going to be stuff redacted as well but either way it's a big step he signed the bill within 30 days there's going to be a big trove of information for everyone to pour through Sophie I know you're a major bookworm well waking up this morning half, half of the UK's authors say they fear that AI could end up replacing their work entirely. Research from Cambridge found a majority of them say that they think their books are already being used to train generative models without their permission. There's a lot of fear out there for all sorts of creators about AI but I think writing more than other areas is perhaps going to be most under threat?

6:50I find the story really depressing, I'll be honest, because I think that they're right. I think that AI is going to have a huge impact on novelists, right? Because writing a novel is a long, arduous, time-consuming, difficult, creative task, right? And if you can get AI to do it quickly, cheaply, don't have to pay any advances, then I can't see why publishers wouldn't start doing that and the difficulty is I think that AI is obviously improved um it is improving all the time but for me you know I'm somebody who you know books that kind of define my life in a way um novels in particular and I find the trend firstly the trend about AI deeply worrying because I think that novels keep us in touch with humanity I think they teach us empathy I think they get us in the heads of other people so make us understand the world more and um care more about other people and understand people who don't have the same views as us.

7:48And we're already seeing a crisis in book reading anyway, right? It's falling off a cliff. And, you know, I think it's something that should trouble us.

7:56Sophy Ridge:So MPs today are going to tell terrible dad jokes in the House of Commons to highlight their paternity leave concerns, which they say is the worst dad joke of all. Very brilliant, this. And we've got a few examples in here that we're going to hear later today so the liberal democrat mp for henley and thames is saying i used to hate facial hair but then it grew on me um and then the labor mp for portsmouth north um is amanda martin is going to say a skeleton walks into a pub and says i'll have a pint of lager and a mop please that's quite good that was quite good so and obviously the point here is they're saying that the worst joke of all is the extent of paternity leave pay and it's something that needs to be fixed.

8:43I love this. I actually love a bad joke. Will, come on. Got a dad joke for us.

8:47Sophy Ridge:I do like telling dad jokes and sometimes he even laughs. Oh, very good. Very good. It doesn't quite work because my dad's not around anymore. But anyway. I think it adds to it. It still works. Exactly. So bad with my humour he left the room. I love it. what I love about this as well is we just get to tell dad jokes all through the day because of it yeah so tell us your dad jokes the email address runs cheatsheet at sky.uk we love dad jokes brighten up our morning the best thing about having a child is the joy of having a child the second best thing is it then made my humour fit what it already was what dad joke terrible dad joke I love it I love it that is it for today's cheat sheet I hope you've enjoyed all the episodes this week.

9:34You can follow us on YouTube. Obviously, listen wherever you're listening to this already. You've probably found it out. And also email us as well if you've got any story suggestions. If you've got any dad jokes that Wilf could nick and pass on for his name. Please do. We'd be very appreciative. Cheatsheet at Sky.uk. Do listen tomorrow as well when you've got Anna Jones and Kamali Melbourne, who are going to have all the news you need in 10 minutes.

9:59How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.