I WAS chopping carrots in desultory fashion the other day when Radio 4’s PM programme gave me what the author William Burrough’s called a ‘naked lunch moment’.

That’s a sudden blast of clarity about the state of the world; an instant of realisation when you truly see what monstrosity sits at the end of your fork, what ghastly pap you’re shovelling into your soul.

Evan Davis, in bouncing puppy-dog style, was talking about AI podcasts. These aren’t podcasts about AI, but podcasts made by AI. Sans human. The BBC fed some foul machine a news story about traffic and an AI spewed out a 16 minute podcast.

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What emerged was so convincingly anodyne it could have been one of the current crop of pedestrian podcasts: two chirpy talking-heads - one male, one female - wittering on in a transatlantic smear of an accent. If I hadn’t been told it was fake, all the results of some computer’s dreaming microchips, I would have thought it the Real McCoy.

I wanted to take a hammer to all the technology in my house - to picket the BBC for amplifying this crap. Then Davis started talking about AI documentaries, so I just walked out into the misty night and cried.

I exaggerate my misery, and try to add some humour to the experience. It’s so insufferably depressing you must find a lighter side or go nuts.

But this is what our culture has sunk to: computer-generated news.

Technology is turning society into a horror movie. Recently, footage emerged of a YouTube interview with a young woman called Lily Phillips. She's a star of the DIY online site OnlyFans.

Phillips appeared........

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