- Best of enemies part two - 14th July 2025
- Childish politics - 11th July 2025
- Dead unlucky - 10th July 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry identifying wrong doers (corrupt public officials, or dishonest police officers for example) was fundamental, so he is intrigued at how a new villain is now emerging in popular culture – technology, and particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In the old days it was simple to identify, but difficult to prove.
I am talking here about corruption.
Invariably you would have to engage in secret recording, so that the corrupt practice was on tape and could be proved to a jury in court, making your lawyer happy.
While that still happens (and we hear about it on The Eye), there is another offender to take into consideration today, making it even more complicated, and it shows up in popular culture.
Formerly films like ‘All The President’s Men’ showed heroic journalists doing their work, where the only technology was a typewriter, yet now it is all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technological ‘advances’.
In the past only a few big films grappled with the idea of monstrous tech – among them Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and the ‘Terminator’ as well as ‘Matrix franchises – but now lots do.
In the two most recent ‘Mission: Impossible’ instalments, for instance, Tom Cruise’s indestructible (human) secret agent tangled with an evil AI called ‘The Entity’.
Films such as ‘Afraid’, ‘Companion’ and ‘The Creator’ have debated whether real humans or simulated ones are deadlier.
Even ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’, a claymation caper from Aardman, featured a sinister robotic garden gnome.
Ask anyone in the TikTok generation to name their favourite AI baddy, though, and they are bound to pick the titular anti-heroine of ‘M3GAN’, a tongue-in-cheek science-fiction technology slasher film about a sentient life-sized doll.
Much of the film’s macabre appeal comes from the contrast between the robot’s innocent appearance and its capacity for gruesome murder.
This contrast was encapsulated in a clip of M3GAN dancing before grabbing a blade.
The scene went viral and helped the film to box-office success in 2023: it grossed more than $180 million worldwide, from a production budget of $12 million.
A sequel was inevitable. So was its title: ‘M3GAN 2.0’.
The conceit of the first film was that a product designer, Gemma (Allison Williams), built M3GAN as a playmate for her orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw).
Programmed to protect Cady, the android took the task to homicidal extremes, and so, one killing spree later, it was consigned to the scrapheap.
In the sequel, Gemma’s technology has been stolen by a defence contractor and used to develop another, even more destructive, military-grade robot called AMELIA.
The only person (or non-person) who can defeat it is a refurbished, upgraded M3GAN.
Presumably lawyers may be involved in this film too – but the laws of libel are unlikely to be at the front of their minds.
How technology has changed stories today will certainly be at the forefront of journalists’ minds!
Some of the stories Phil has covered over the years (including ones that involved corruption), as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Best of enemies part three comes soon, where Phil explores how perceptions of the GOOD guys are changing.
Tomorrow – how news that a Welsh expert witness whose evidence helped in the controversial conviction of Lucy Letby, claimed that the nurse’s supporters are motivated by a sexual attraction to “pretty young blonde females”, and that there have been recent arrests at the hospital where she worked, highlight the vital part Wales plays in the continuing drama, providing an opportunity to re-publish The Eye’s story about the remarkable case from earlier in the year.
