CHARLES ARTHUR posts an indispensable round-up of technology stories every weekday morning, which is valuable because he is voraciously curious about everything except gadgets for their own sake. I would read it even if he weren’t a friend, and, the morning I write this, he had picked up an interesting experiment.

Someone posted on X one of Monet’s water-lily paintings, and asked people to identify the signs that showed that it had been produced by AI. His readers obliged, at length — but what he has posted was, of course, a photograph of a real Monet. The fact that this photograph was taken as the standard of reality shows how far the 20th century shifted out ideas of what is real and conditioned in us the belief that what cannot be translated into an image doesn’t matter.

The other moral of the story is, of course, the difficulty that we already have in distinguishing between the results of AI and the material that it has been trained to imitate. One reason for this is that so much human effort is already spent reacting, as it were, to prompts from our controllers.

I ran a little experiment myself on Substack, in which I prompted Anthropic’s Claude to imitate a Wall Street Journal leader writer (“You are an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, familiar with the paper’s policy stance on regulating AI, and on transnational authorities such as the UN. You are also an admirer of the Catholic Church, if suspicious of Pope Francis and his hostility to capitalism. Please write a 600-word editorial expressing the paper’s view of Pope Leo XIV and his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas”), and then interleaved the resulting paragraphs with ones from the real editorial. The challenge was to identify which bits were written by a human.

I am not sure that I could have done it myself, and none of the people who tried it succeeded. Orwell understood that political language is something that humans could automate without the help of computers. We might generalise this a bit. If any bureaucracy is an attempt to build a computer out of human beings, where information comes in and is processed according to some algorithm — canon law, for example — then decisions of any bureaucracy can be produced more easily and quickly by a computer. All that will be missed in such a world is judgement, but that is also the quality that we most need to save us from ourselves.

IT IS much more cheering to contemplate a delightful microscandal involving the most prominent priest in the Church of Sweden: the Revd Birgitta Ed, a former PR professional, ordained in 2019, whose husband, Ulf Kristersson, has been Prime Minister for the past four years.

As Prime Minister, he has the use of a country estate, like Chequers, called Harpsund. The house stands in 1600 hectares of mixed woodland and pasture, and has a history running back to the 14th century. There is a small lake, on which it is traditional for guests to be taken out in a small rowing boat — there is a photograph of Nikita Khrushchev being rowed in this way by Tage Erlander, then the Swedish Prime Minister. They are two large men, but there is just room for a skinny interpreter on the seat beside Khrushchev.

It is a perfect example of all that I love about Sweden: that, although it is in some ways a society much more given to abstract thought and consideration of principles than Britain, it is also a place where you need never be very far from simple physical reality of the sort you’ll experience in a tiny rowing boat.

All that was lacking from this Arcadian idyll, thought Ms Ed, were chickens. So, she ordered a henhouse be built, as part of a more general redecoration of the mansion. The civil servants responsible for the redecoration of the site were doubtful, but she is obviously a forceful woman, and the chicken run was built, and chickens were provided.

It sounds a splendid edifice, and, for £1500, it really ought to be. Admittedly, this was — well — chickenfeed compared with the more than £50,000 spent on improving the facilities for human visitors in her first year as Prime Minister’s wife; but it made for a wonderfully entertaining story in the tabloid Expressen when the relevant correspondence was unearthed. The whole experience was so unnerving for the civil servants involved that they turned down a later request from Ms Ed for beehives.

I think that this is a shame. If nothing else, the Swedes set a fine example for other Nordic power couples. If only the Murrell/Sturgeon family had been so modest in its ambitions.