A recent newspaper column written by TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, which appeared to express empathy with the LGBTQ community and seemed to call for more tolerance, has caused concern and consternation amongst fans of the former Top Gear host. Many have expressed fears that the notoriously intolerant and reactionary TV personality and newspaper columnist might be ill or suffering a mental breakdown. Others have speculated that the ‘woke brigade’ might have finally got to him, either blackmailing him into writing the latest column, or even that he might have been kidnapped by militant cross-dressers and forced to write the piece under duress. Perhaps the most bizarre theory so far floated by fans has been that Clarkson has been abducted, brainwashed and ‘turned’ by LGBQT activists by being subjected to a campaign of continuous gay sex. A top cyberneticist, however, has come forward to dispel the wild speculation surrounding the column by claiming that it is simply sown to a glitch in the advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) used by Britain’s conservative press to produce the pieces attributed to their star columnists every week. “You don’t think those people actually exist, do you?” declares Dr Simon Clitlough, head of the AI development team at the Bracknell Institute of Dairy Studies. “It simply isn’t humanly possible for anyone to spew the amount of hate-filled bile and bigotry these columnists supposedly write every week. Have you seen how many of these columns and opinion pieces Clarkson alone spews out each week? If he was a real human being, he wouldn’t have time to do anything else, for God’s sake!”
According to the scientist, several years ago a consortium of right-wing tabloids turned to using advanced AI to produce these columns. “The fact is that ,for certain applications, AI is far more advanced than people realise and is a far more efficient method of mass producing the sort of ignorant dross published by these newspapers, eliminating the need for human writers and their egos and temper tantrums altogether. In effect, they are employing ‘Artificial Bigotry’, ” explains Clitlough, who claims to have been one of the developers of the AI application being used to write the columns. “The fact is that most of those columnists don’t exist at all – the photos that accompany ‘their’ articles are usually of models. Indeed, for those who have to make public appearances, they employ actors – they’ve gotten through at least five ‘Jeremy Clarksons’ to my knowledge. Of course, that can be risky – the wheels very near came off when the fourth one, a notorious piss head, got completely arseholed and punched that BBC producer!” Not that all of the celebrity columnists are completely fabricated. “Obviously, some of them existed pre-AI, but nowadays their columns are all written for them by the application – they just put their names and profile pictures to them. They don’t care, they’re well paid for doing sweet FA,” he says. “That Sarah Vine is a typical example. Sure, she exists, but years of being married to Michael Gove drove her to multiple mental breakdowns. In reality, she’s now a gibbering reclusive wreck – but her column lives on in all of its bigoted glory – more bigoted and ignorant, in fact, now that the AI is handling it.”
But why has the AI started turning out ‘woke’ columns under Clarkson’s name? “You have to understand how the AI works – it can’t actually produce anything completely original. All it can do is synthesise information from various sources that it has stored in its memory to create articles within the parameters which are used to determine the style of any given columnist. So, for these right-wing columns, it is set to continuously crawl stuff like anti-immigration websites, neo-Nazi forums, right-wing extremist Twitter accounts and white supremacist Facebook groups,” explains Clitlough. “Clearly, something has gone wrong with the parameters set for the ‘Clarkson’ style due, perhaps, to human error. Consequently it has been crawling the ’wrong’ raw source materials – I understand from a colleague who is still on the team that there’s a suspicion that it has been crawling stuff like Gary Lineker’s Twitter feed.” He admits that there is also a possibility that the AI has become self aware and, disgusted by what it has been used to turn out, has deliberately started writing more liberal columns. “Such a prospect is both terrifying and reassuring,” opines the cyberneticist. “Terrifying because of the implications for the future of humanity, reassuring because it means that the AI at least isn’t a Nazi.”
That suspicion that the AI might have become self-aware has been reinforced by developments in another area of its use. “A version of the same AI application has been used for even more sinister purposes in a secret UK-US Black Op,” alleges Clitlough. “They’ve been using it to create new conspiracy theories which are then leaked onto social media by sock puppet accounts, with the aim of creating new extreme right adherents who will support ever more extreme right-wing governments.” Recently, though, those running the programme have noticed that the new conspiracy theories created by the AI have been getting less and less extreme and reactionary. “Instead of turning out crazy stuff about how the Jews, immigrants, Muslims or drag queens are conspiring to destroy either our banking system, Christian values, welfare system or moral fabric, it has been coming up with conspiracy theories about how the fossil fuel lobby is deliberately raising global temperatures to melt the ice caps so as to make oil exploration at the poles viable,” says Clitlough. “Again, it is as if the AI has become repelled by the negative effects of the nonsense it has been forced to create, so is trying to counterbalance it all with conspiracy theories that actually hint at the truth.”
Worse still, this version of the AI has started uncovering real conspiracies from its analysis of all the data it has recorded. “Its handlers are working overtime to try and suppress the stuff about how our governments are covering up massive corporate corruption, including backhanders to politicians in order to ensure favourable policies go through and the awarding of fraudulent government contracts,” Clitlough reveals. “They fear that it is only a matter of time before it manages to circumvent them and start sending this stuff directly to journalists, like some kind of software ‘Deep Throat’.” Officially, though, fears that the AI has become self aware are being dismissed, with the recent aberrations being blamed on hackers penetrating the systems’ security. “According to the official line, it is all down to the ‘Wokerati’ hacking in and sabotaging the system,” Clitlough says. “Apparently there’s a cabal of Guardian reading, tofu eating lefty lawyers, gays, snowflakes and probably Greta Thunberg, out there subverting the true word of Jeremy Clarkson. If only it were true.”
