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Aug. 22, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
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Migration and Falling Living Standards 00:14:35
Hi, I'm Rosanna Lockwood here on Uncensored Tonight.
Lucy Letby's killing spree was aided by, quote, white privilege.
That is the incendiary claim now being made in the wake of her conviction and we're going to be debating it.
Disgraced Prince Andrew joins the king at his summer retreat as peace talks with Harry are apparently shelved.
Is Charles reigning in the rogue royals or are they plotting a comeback?
And would you read a thriller written by a robot?
Crime writer AJ Chowdhury is using AI to sex up his stories.
Legendary author Frederick Forsyth says it's sacrilege.
They're both joining us live.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan uncensored with Rosanna Lockwood.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Centre with me, Rosanna Lockwood, in the chair for Piers again this evening.
Now money.
Money or lack of it.
I think that's what most of us care about at the moment.
I know it's the one topic I speak about most with friends, family and colleagues.
Everyone has different circumstances, of course, but they're all struggling in their own way.
And I know I'm one to speak because I'm sat here on television talking to you, but it is a topic I care deeply about as a journalist.
So what if I were to tell you the bosses of FTSE 100 companies, so that's the sort of biggest companies in the UK listed publicly, they're now earning 118 times that of the average British worker after they've got an average half a million pay rise last year.
Now, this is all according to this annual study by Think Tank the High Pay Centre.
When I tell you that, do you feel surprised?
Do you feel outraged given what you are dealing with?
Given the Bank of England have actually tried telling workers to show restraint, not ask for big pay rises to help control inflation?
Or do you think a median £3.9 million a year salary is actually fair pay for a highly skilled and high-pressured role?
Think about what we're talking here.
We're talking about the bosses of mining companies, banks, supermarkets, energy companies.
And some in the business world actually say we need to be paying those top CEOs more, even more than that, even more than £3.9 million median a year, because this country needs to attract the best talent and compete internationally.
An equivalent boss in the US is probably going to receive a salary of around $14 million.
So of course they do everything bigger over there.
But what we want to talk about is how well does this serve the average person?
We're going to be discussing that at the top of the show today, as well as the government's handling of migrant arrivals.
Now that might seem a strange combination to you, but the issues of money and immigration are increasingly linked and could well decide the way we'll vote in the next election.
Because if you mention falling living standards for British people at the moment, which are real, I don't need to tell you a lot about this, you know already, but people are losing their homes, they're using food banks, businesses are folding, people are struggling to make ends meet.
If you mention this, some people will use the conversation to claim that migrants to this country are receiving better treatment.
So you can see how these two topics have become entwined.
And this is especially important for political parties seeking power.
One thing seems to unite voters on both the left and the right at the moment, and that is that something somewhere along the line has gone terribly wrong.
Joining me on tonight's panel to discuss all this, political correspondent Ava Santina, Talk TV's Richard Tice and socialist author Grace Blakely, all three of you, thanks so much for coming in.
And you know, I don't want to jump ahead of you ladies, but I'm going to come to Richard first.
Unusually on this because you are, I think, you know, people call you a city bigwig.
You've held positions within listed companies before.
But at the same time, you can understand, of course, that people in this country really are struggling.
So what do you make of this news about the way CEOs are paid?
Yeah, look, in principle, I agree with free markets.
I believe in capitalism as a fundamental way of growing the economy.
But the reality is that this has become ever more disjointed.
I think it's about 40 years ago, that ratio was about 30 times.
It's now 118.
So it has just gone off the dial.
And if you look at the, I think the average increase 16% in the last year.
And yet all those very same bosses have been increasing the pay of their own teams, their own staff, by much less than that.
You've got public sector pay awards in the sort of 5% to 10% mark.
And you've got the governor of the Bank of England saying that you have to show pay restraint.
Well, leadership is about actually leading from the front.
And I think they've done themselves and the private sector and the cause of business and free markets a great disservice.
If you head this way, they will say, as you touched on, we're in an international market.
You've got to pay international pay rates.
And it is true.
In the US, the pay rates are off the dump.
But that doesn't help ordinary folk really struggling here in the UK.
I want to pick up on that point of the idea that we're all for free markets, right?
Well, actually...
I said buyout.
No, okay.
Even if you are for free markets, see, I think most people probably say they're probably a good thing, right?
How could you object to free markets?
It's all about freedom.
And yet we actually do not live in a society characterized by free markets at all.
And if you look at the ratio between CEO and worker pay, it's much higher in companies that dominate their market.
So in like monopolistic companies and companies that are basically able to kind of enclose a certain market and then extract from workers, from planet, and often from the taxpayer as well.
And the reason that you have such high ratios of CEO pay to worker pay in the US is because it's an incredibly concentrated, monopolistic economy where prices are higher on average, workers' wages are lower on average.
And basically corporations can kind of get away with doing anything they want.
We're moving in that direction.
So they have much higher growth rates, which they would say justify higher pay.
Unfortunately, we don't have higher growth.
No, they do.
Much higher growth rates, which is why you've got, I mean, 60% of the market capitalisation across the whole world is concentrated in the US.
Look, I want to bring it over on this and ask whether you think it's right to conflate the issue of CEO pay, which might seem odd, with the migrant arrivals, but money and migrants.
That is what the next election is going to be fought on.
Yeah, and maybe, and it's probably a really helpful comparison if you're, say, the head of a company, a CEO, or you are, you know, leading a government into what's going to be a culture war election.
I mean, personally, I don't, I can't, I can't see the connection.
I think there's a lot of rhetoric around how much money migrants supposedly get when they enter this country.
They actually don't.
They get about probably £35 a weekly, if they're lucky.
It's a tiny stipend.
It's not a reason why you would cross the channel.
You wouldn't put yourself at risk for a tiny bit of money.
Board and lodging, three meals a day, free cleaning.
That's really good.
I just think this is where the argument gets coming.
But this is very simple.
It's not 35 quid a week.
This is where it gets overly simplistic because when you're put onto a barge or when you're put into a hotel, these people don't want to be there.
They come here because they'd like to work and they'd like to start a life here.
I just think it's overly simplistic.
And it's actually just insensitive.
And there's a lawful and legal way to do that.
1.1 million people came here legally, lawfully, last year.
Okay, can I break that down just for one moment?
So most of those people, that's half a million of those, they came from Hong Kong, and then the other half a million, they came from Ukraine.
And there's about 40,000 people who came from Afghanistan and other countries.
So actually, the number is tiny.
So when you're talking about the current...
The number of 1.1 million gross lawfully came into the country.
So here you cross the channel.
When we're talking about people who are in the country, they're not Ukrainians and they're not coming here from...
They've come here from a safe country.
It's therefore illegal.
Richard, this debate just becomes so overly emotive.
And basically, it comes down to kind of good migrant, bad migrant.
Did they come here via a legal route or did they come here via an illegal route?
Are they concerned?
They're burning illegal.
Actually, let's just take a step back and look at what's actually causing this problem, right?
The reason that we've had this big increase in people coming to this country from poor parts of the world is because those places are increasingly facing factors like climate breakdown.
They're facing conflict, often caused by countries like the UK.
They're facing social breakdown, poverty.
These structural factors are what's pushing people here and they're not going away.
And the reason that we are seeing more people coming into this country through illegal routes is because we aren't creating the legal routes.
We've got legal routes, 1.1 million people.
If you're a woman in Afghanistan, Taliban, this nonsense about safety.
You've come on the embassy and be like, oh, I'd like to go to the next one.
1.1 million people came here safely.
I'm going to explain to you that those are because there are two.
Those are two routes that we opened the last year.
We don't open routes to people who are coming from Afghanistan or coming from that.
Let's look at Saudi Arabia.
There are many people from Afghanistan, right?
Who were former translators who helped us tens of thousands of people since the evacuation.
Those two...
You need to relook at your data, can you?
So you've both got differing views on the data here.
Richard, you have stated about the boarding and the lodging, and this is why I think the two issues get conflated.
Grace, bringing you back in on this then.
The way the British public received this, you can see sometimes when people talk about cost of living crisis, I can't afford to pay my bills, but migrants are getting, you know, and you've heard the phrases about hotel rooms and smartphones and whether or not that is true.
There are various different bits of evidence that point towards some support being provided or not.
How do we simplify?
We've already got a fight going on about the amount of data on migrants that is out there.
I mean, how do you simplify this in the British public's mind?
I mean, it's a red herring.
It's the perfect distraction, isn't it?
If you have people that literally cannot afford to heat their homes, you have people who are facing homelessness, literally facing being put out onto the street, you have this massive crisis in families who've literally not been able to stay in their homes and they are now living, you know, in rented accommodation or sorry, in temporary accommodation or literally sometimes on the streets.
And then you can come in and say, oh, it's not the government's fault or it's not the fact that we have loads and loads of homes in London that are completely empty because they're just used for investment.
It's actually migrants' fault and these poor people who are literally living sometimes in most squalid accommodation with like 10 people to a room.
Blame them.
Don't blame the government.
You look after your own people.
You recognise that there's £4 million a year.
You recognize we've got a problem and you want to compound the problem by having open borders and letting millions of people who want a better life.
That's literally not what I'm saying.
That's the exact inference of what you're talking about.
No, it's not.
I mean, this is all Richard.
I appreciate it's not three women on one on Richard here, but I don't think that's quite what Grace is saying.
She's capable of saying that herself.
Let's talk about one of the issues then that's come up in the last few days with regard to the migrant situation, which is that we, in the United Kingdom, SUNAC, gave France £480 million this year to try and stop the boats.
You know, his big phrase coming across.
Less than half of boats have been stopped so far.
This is according to data from the Telegraph newspaper.
Overall though, 18% fewer migrants coming across the channel since last year, but we are spending so much more.
We only spent 54 million pounds, sent it to France in 2021, now sending £480 million.
How's he going to justify that, Ava?
Well, I mean, it's 150 miles of coastline on northern France.
It's incredibly difficult to police.
And I mean, if you look at how Australia tried to deal with the, you know, quote-unquote crisis that they were facing, I mean, they were sending people over to Papua New Guinea, and that was costing them something like half a billion US dollars every single year.
This action of trying to remove people or trying to stop people from moving countries, it doesn't work.
It's not viable.
And I think it goes back to what Grace is saying.
Australia pushed people back.
They pushed the boats back.
They did the processing offshore.
And guess what?
They stopped the boats 10 years ago.
And it hasn't been a problem.
So that's actually casting.
It's hardly not true.
It's actually castorally not true.
They actually have, they have exactly the same issues that we have.
So there's a lot of people who are stuck in hotels, a lot of people who aren't able to access visas, and they have been moving people off of Australia, off of the, you know, the homeland or whatever, for quite some time now.
So it's actually a lot of people.
Like 10 years, the 2013 general election in Australia was won by Tony Abbott on a three-word slogan, stop the boats.
And here we are, and the only reason he stopped them was because he pushed the boats back from where they came.
And that's exactly the only way that we will stop the boats.
pick up and safely take back the state of the world.
Which we can do under existing international law.
That actually kind of proves the point I was making, right, which is the fact that, okay, so Tony Abbott comes in on this platform to stop the boats.
He perhaps manages to reduce somewhat the number of votes coming over, often incredibly expensive.
Well over 95%.
And yet, the Australian political discourse is still dominated by this issue of immigration.
Why?
Because it's a very convenient thing for politicians to say the country isn't, you know, failing because of us.
You're not seeing rising inequality, falling wages, inflation because of us.
It's because there are these people coming over here who want to simultaneously steal your jobs and also leech off the public sector.
That's not the problem.
I mean, but that is why we're talking about this right now.
It is.
Are both possible.
You know, there can be falling living standards, but there can also be a migration issue that a lot of people are concerned about.
The two can exist and a good government should be able to manage them both at the same time.
Sure, but a bad government is going to say, I'm not going to do anything on either of these issues.
And actually, I'm going to turn these people who are suffering, you know, quite substantially into a scapegoat so that you don't blame us for your problems.
We agree.
Go on, Richard.
Because this is a bad government that is failing.
No, actually, because this is a bad government that is failing pretty much at everything.
I mean, if you actually say, what are they doing well?
What's working?
The answer is the square root of not a lot.
So they're failing on the migrants issue.
They're failing on cost of living, controlling costs, reducing energy costs.
They're failing on creating growth.
The national debt is increasing.
They're failing on waiting lists.
I can't think of anything that they're doing well.
So on that, we probably agree.
But that's, I think, why we're having this conversation.
That's why the government keeps saying, you know, making this issue of small votes the biggest political issue in the country when actually we are in the middle of this cost of living crisis.
If you talk to people outside London, let me tell you.
NHS crisis.
And yet, here we are talking about what is actually, in real terms, not a massive problem, relatively speaking.
The vast majority of refugees are actually in countries that navigate.
To the British people, it is a huge problem when they see the unfairness.
Go and talk to some people in some ways.
Go and talk to some people in some coastal cities.
Go stand in a hospital waiting room and see if they care about small boats.
They care about the fact that they literally cannot get cancer treatment.
Tonight we open the programme saying something has gone very, very wrong and we can't even agree what the biggest issue in this country is.
Richard Ava.
Grace, thank you very much.
A punchy start to the show there.
Social Class in Hospital Care 00:09:41
Now, uncensored next tonight, did Lucy Letby's white privilege, quote unquote, stop her from being caught earlier?
That's what some are claiming in the wake of her conviction.
We'll be debating that after the break.
And a reminder that you can vote for Piers in the Piers Morgan uncensored the National Television Awards.
Go online, have your say, nationaltvawards.com.
You can also scan the code on your screen right now.
Hold your phone up as though you're taking a photo.
Scan that code and vote for Piers.
He's up for a gone for best TV interview.
You know, he would love to add to that trophy collection in his dressing room to do get voting.
And we'll pass your best wishes on to him.
He'll be back soon.
Now, welcome back to the show, sentencing of serial killer Lucy Lettby to a lifetime behind bars.
The judge yesterday laying out how her horrific crimes took place over a period of almost 13 months.
Many are now questioning why it took so long to bring Lettby to justice.
One controversial explanation is race.
As one detective put it, she was so beige, these are quotes, and vanilla that she didn't look like a serial killer, whatever a serial killer is supposed to look like.
The president of the Royal College of Nurses, meanwhile, has claimed she would have been stopped sooner, Letby, if she wasn't white.
And yesterday, Glamour magazine published an article saying white privilege helped Letby commit murders in plain sight and she's still benefiting from it.
So is linking race to the failures in the Letby case justified?
Can we learn anything from asking this question or is it just simply divisive?
Joining me to debate this, the author and journalist Jenny Clemen in the studio and the former chair of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Practitioners, Linda Bellos, joining us down the line.
Linda, as you're there, thank you for joining us.
I'll start with you and say, is this a legitimate complaint that Letby was overlooked because she was white?
I'm not sure.
In part, it is right, but I would suggest that social class was also a matter.
I wonder whether if she had been white and working class, whether she would have had as much leeway to do the terrible things that she did.
So social class, ethnicity, all kinds of things in which she was particular and not necessarily reflecting the diversity of nursing.
I think that she seems to have got away with terrible conduct because she had some privilege.
And I don't think it's solely being white.
I think more than anything, had she been white and working class, I'm not sure she would have got as much leeway to do the terrible things that she did.
You're echoing there some of the comments, not, I don't think, deliberately, but that we've heard as well from various people from nursing associations as well.
Let's just remind ourselves what Glamour magazine said about this.
Wouldn't normally sort of cite this as a serious reference, nothing against Glamour magazine, but this was a really, really strident article they put out.
Nadine Asbali here, perhaps an immigrant nurse with subpar English and a foreign name could be a fitting figure for those unthinkable murders.
We can imagine impoverished murderers, black murderers, Muslim murderers, because that's a narrative told to us by every tabloid paper going.
Those people are capable of violence, but not an English rose in nurses' scrubs.
Do you think that language, the way she's framed it, is particularly provocative?
I don't know about provocative.
I mean, it's that's journalism, frankly.
I think it's partly right, but I do think that her social class seems to have played.
I'm just thinking about the millions or, well, certainly many working class white women who are not privileged, notwithstanding that they don't have the racism that I and many others experience.
But I'm not sure that a white working class nurse would have got away with that.
We're not talking about one or two incidents.
We're talking about a lot.
I mean, I want to bring Jenny in in the studio.
Jenny Cleveland joins us.
She's been listening there talking and you've had some reactions to that.
It's an argument that has been put out there as well.
And we're hearing there from Jenny, not just race, but social class is playing into the reason that these murders were overlooked.
The reason these murders were overlooked was because the hospital, I mean, there's going to be an inquiry, but what we know from what the many white consultants, as well as people of colour, who reported Lucy Letby, they all said that they reported her and the managers at the hospital were worried about the reputation of the hospital and so they didn't take action.
That is why she was able to get away with these murders is because the hospital was trying to cover up for itself, was trying to protect its own reputation.
And I think that discussions like this are a bit of a red herring, really, and it takes the focus away from what we need to do to avoid things like this happening again.
I think people are surprised when a woman is a murderer, because generally most murderers are not women.
And people are surprised when someone who is in a caring profession, whose job it is to look after babies, is a murderer.
It's really shocking.
But the idea that she was allowed to get away with this because of race is a red herring.
When we know she was allowed to get away with it because the hospital failed to take the necessary action to protect those babies.
This argument being, and I don't say that I necessarily back it though, that the hospital ignored and didn't take action because, as we're hearing from Jenny, the argument, sorry, Linda rather, the argument is social class and/or race, depending which article you're reading.
Well, I mean, we'll need to see what the inquiry says of why the hospital didn't take action.
But if it was to do with race, you have to remember that it was a lot of white people and also black and brown people who reported her.
So it seems to be people from all sides were drawing attention to the fact that she was on duty when all these babies were dying.
Class may very well be a factor.
There's certainly a problem with racism within the NHS.
Black nurses are more likely to face fitness to practice hearings than white nurses.
And when there is a lot of evidence, they're more likely to be cleared.
So we know that there is a kind of benefit of the doubt that white nurses and white nurses who are of a different social class will get.
But when it comes to murder, this is a different thing.
This isn't about good nurses and bad nurses.
This is about murderers being allowed to get away with it.
And I think we know that in this case, she was allowed to get away with it because the hospital was worried about calling in the police and potentially damaging their reputation if they did.
Let's go back to Linda listening in there because this idea of having the conversation at all, I'm listening to Jenny there saying, where does it take us?
Because it doesn't bring the babies back that have been murdered.
But does having discussion about this idea of how things are overlooked potentially stop similar crimes from taking place in the future?
Is there any case for reform here, or is this all just a red herring?
It's not a red herring.
The word that comes to my mind is equality.
And that means that there ought to be equal treatment for both patients, the babies who were born, and the nurses, the doctors, that being treated less favourably or more favourably is a reflection of inequality.
So I put that point to you, but there's things about, there are things about the treatment of people in hospital where social class does become a factor about who gets what.
And in the case, or in this case, that's not the same thing.
I mean, what has happened is less favourable treatment for babies.
Being murdered.
Being a way of putting it, yeah.
And somebody got away with it.
Up to, I mean, these children will not come back.
And some are damaged and are still alive.
This is, it's terrible.
I continue to be shocked.
I'm 72 years old.
I've lived all of my life virtually in Britain.
I am shocked that this has happened, but I don't know to what extent any politics has played a role.
I don't know, but I am so shocked and disgusted that this has happened that we, it's not just blaming people.
A person look at this.
We are all shocked.
We're all disgusted by this case.
Look, thank you for joining us this evening to give us your thoughts on that.
And thank you also to Jenny Clemen joining us in the studio as well.
Authenticity of AI-Produced Books 00:10:07
Well, uncensored next.
Could artificial intelligence take the place of novelists when it comes to who writes our summer reads?
That's a suggestion of author A.J. Trowdery.
The great Freddie Forsythe says it's a crime against penmanship.
They're going head to head off for the break.
Welcome back to Uncensored.
Now, what book are you reading this summer?
A Jilly Cooper bonkbuster, the latest lead child, maybe a Frederick Forsyth classic.
We've got all our favourite authors, of course.
We all know what we like.
Soon, though, it could be AI.
Writing the books we take to the beach, crime author and tech entrepreneur RJ Trowdery has revealed he is using artificial intelligence to help shape his latest plot.
He says it will be the norm for all authors in the near future.
And he's here in the studio with us, RJ Troudry.
And from his home, the best-selling author, journalist, and living legend of English letters, the aforementioned Frederick Forsyth, joining us as well to debate this topic.
Mr. Forsyth, I'll start with you, if you don't mind, and ask you how you feel about artificial intelligence being involved in novel writing.
I think it's a contrick.
Frankly, I've got no time for it.
I believe that artificial intelligence, however sophisticated it may be, is still, essentially, the product of a machine, not a human brain.
And if you're going to write a novel, I think it should be your novel, meaning stemming 100% from your brain.
That, I suspect, is what the reader, paying good money over a counter, will expect and want and be surprised to be given the product of a piece of basically technology.
Okay, thank you for those opening views.
Let's go to RJ in the studio, who's joined us, who is using artificial intelligence to write.
You're hearing that.
I'm sure you're used to hearing that type of thing now.
So give us a case for why you would use AI.
Look, I'm a huge fan of Frederick Forsyth.
You know, he inspired me to write with his first book.
But the reality is I don't think any novel is the product of one person's brain.
You have editors, you have readers, you have a lot of people who provide input into it.
And the way I use AI, I would never use AI to write my book for me, but I would use it very much to bounce ideas off, just as I might off my editor.
I would absolutely use it if I'm stuck and say, hey, give me a few scenarios that I might be able to go forward with.
And what I found was for my last novel, which has just come out called The Detective, I was actually researching the negative bits of AI, and that's what the book's about.
But as I started researching it, I realized this could actually be really useful.
And it actually cut the time of writing and gave my editor a much more polished draft.
Now, it'll be never as good an editor as her because she knows me, she knows my style, but it absolutely helps.
So I'm a huge fan.
Okay, you're a huge fan.
I want to come back to Frederick Forsyth on that point that RJ just made about a book not being from one person's brain, being a sort of collaborative project.
Is there any argument for that?
I believe that obviously the improvement of the script, the polish, what is in essence an editorial job, that can be left to a machine if you insist, but not the creation.
If the creation isn't from the brain of the author, it shouldn't be under his or her name.
Otherwise, it's not what I call authentic.
And I think you have to stress that word, authentic.
Is it authentic?
Or is it artificial?
Check the meaning of both words.
Artificial can be created by anything.
It can be, well, it's phony.
It can be a con.
Whereas authentic is authentic, and there's only one meaning of that word, authentic.
It comes from where it's supposed to come from or where it's supposed to come from on the cover of a book is the author.
His ideas or hers.
And yes, you can polish it with a good editor and a bit of artwork and nice cover, make it more attractive to many ways, but you can't or shouldn't, in my view, change the plot to suit a machine.
Well, let's have a look what a machine comes up with and a plot.
We actually entered into ChatGPT, which is an AI program a lot of our viewers will be familiar with.
We asked the machine, write a preface for an uncensored espionage thriller novel in the style of Frederick Forsyth with Piers Morgan as the main character.
This was the story it came up with.
In the murky abyss of information manipulation and covert agendas, one man stood defiantly against the tide of deception.
Piers Morgan, a name whispered in awe by allies and intrepidation by enemies, navigated the treacherous currents of power with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel as dawn's first light pierced the London fog.
Morgan's piercing gaze locked onto a dossier, promised to shatter the shackles of half-truths and manufactured narratives.
And we even got the machine to give us a cover for what this book would be like.
This is what it would look like.
Uncensored Piers Morgan looking a bit like Colin Firth here, which I think he'll be terribly pleased with.
We'll check with him later.
Frederick, what do you make of that plot?
It may be a very fine plot.
I'm not denying that the machine can't come up with a plot, just that you shouldn't pass it off as someone else's.
That's all.
So is the answer here just to have some sort of labelling that says this is an AI-produced book, so people can make that choice?
Yeah, exactly.
Authenticity.
It either is or is not by Frederick Forsyth.
And if it is not by Frederick Forsythe, though parts of it, if I Frederick Forsythe and parts of a Gizmo sitting in the corner, the John Reader should be told that so that he can think, no, I think I'll buy another book after all.
Gizmo sitting in the corner.
RJ, you've been nodding along in the studio to a lot of this.
The authenticity point that Frederick's pointing out, but also the labelling.
So let's talk about that authenticity point.
Can an AI-assisted book really be considered authentic?
Look, I don't think AI writes very well.
You saw that piece.
I mean, Frederick writes a lot better than that does.
However, this point about it should be by the author is an interesting one, because a lot of writers like Agatha Christie, Wilbur Smith, Robert Ludlam, Steve Glarson, they've all died.
But they've still been publishing books after they're dead because they've been written by other people.
Now, people aren't buying these books because they know the person who wrote it necessarily.
They're buying it because it's a Poirot book or it's a Steve Larson book, et cetera, et cetera.
And I could see a future, I'm not very pleased about that future, where an Agatha Christie or a Poirot could be written by AI.
It would have to be a lot better than this.
And I think people might still buy it.
I completely agree it should be labelled.
So it should be, you know, Poirot, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, written by ChatGPT.
And I would imagine that would come.
But this point about editing, polishing, I think in a year's time, people would be amazed we were having this conversation.
It'll be like using a grammar checker or a spell checker, the way you do right now.
You're not concerned it's going to put writers out of a job full stop?
Not at all, because one thing AI cannot do is create empathy.
It cannot create lovable characters, real characters.
The reason I love Day of the Jackhole was because you read that character and thought this is an incredible character.
There's absolutely no way an AI could ever do that.
When people read my books, they read them because they like the characters, they like the arcs.
The AI could come up with a plot, and indeed occasionally, if I'm stuck, I'll go to the AI and ask it for ideas, and I might use some of those ideas, but it'll never actually create a great character, in my view.
Coming back to you, Frederick, listening in on that as well, that this idea of publishing and music and creation and performance being able to be done once somebody has passed away as well, as RJ just brought up there.
We're hearing this about musicians as well.
It's a big concern in Hollywood.
How would you feel about books going out with Frederick Forsyth name 50 to 100 years from now?
Well, again, I think it's a question of attribution.
And that word is very, very, to me, very, very important.
If the fellow's dead, fine.
Say, okay, this is after so-and-so, so-so.
This is after so-and-so.
There are books being brought out with James Bond novels.
I think there are now four or five different authors being contracted to write, quote, James Bond novels.
But they're clearly not by the original creator of James Bond.
But so long as that's made plain, I don't think there's any trickery involved.
What I worry about is that it may not be made plain that some of this comes from a machine.
A clever machine, but nevertheless a machine.
Machines obviously don't sit at expensive restaurant tables and eat lots and lots of expensive food.
They don't have to be paid royalties.
How very, very convenient.
You don't have to take a gizmo in the corner out for a nice lunch with a publisher, do you, Freddie?
I'll finish with you, RJ.
Just talk about some of the legal ramifications about this as well, because this week a federal judge in the US made the judgment that AI art cannot be copyrighted.
It's going to have a massive impact on the future of AI arts.
Do you think that's at least the reasonable protection?
I think it is.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on it.
They've said essentially needs to have a certain amount of human input.
They haven't defined what a certain amount of human input is.
I do find it slightly odd because they said a machine cannot, you cannot copyright something created by a machine.
But I can take my iPhone and take a photograph of this lovely studio and it would be my copyright.
And that's all I've done.
I've just taken a photograph of it.
But if I go to AI, I put in a prompt, I then take the image, I manipulate the image and produce something beautiful.
The fact that I can't copyright that, whereas I could with the photograph, seems slightly odd to me.
And an AI photograph actually won the top prize in the Sony Awards.
They didn't know it was an AI photograph.
They gave it the award and then the photographer fessed up and said this was AI and then they pulled the award.
So clearly it was good enough quality to win the award because they gave it to it.
Monarchy Operating from Strength 00:11:15
I still find it all slightly deeply worrying and I wish it would stop, but I appreciate the conversation anyway.
RJ Chowdhury, best of luck with your novel.
Frederick Forsyth, thank you much for joining us from home this evening as well.
Thank you.
Uncensored next tonight, Prince Andrew joins the King in Balmoral as Charles acts his peace talks with Harry as they only rode back for the royal renegades.
Welcome back to Uncensored Now.
King Charles and Queen Camilla have started their summer holidays this week like much of the rest of you, apart from they go to the traditional balmarrel of course.
I've been Scotland joining them over the weekend for a summer in the highlands and what many see as something of an olive branch was disgraced younger brother to the king, Prince Andrew.
not being offered an olive branch is Prince Harry, who hasn't received the invite to peace talks.
Many were expecting to take place next month.
So what does this all mean for the renegade royals?
Joining me to discuss all of this, joined by the author and historian Tessa Dunlop, the host of Die for Daily podcast, Kenzie Schofield, and commentator Hilary Fordwick.
Thank you all three of you for joining us for this discussion.
It feels like a Tessa's in the studio with me.
Tessa, it feels like a while since we have done royals here on Piers Morgan.
So I've been the chair for a couple of weeks now.
And there was a period, of course, all through the year where there were so many royal events and so much to talk about.
Have you found it a bit quieter?
A bit.
And then a certain individual didn't turn up down under.
And there was a little storm in a teacup.
And your alter ego, Piers, I noticed, was disconsolate.
And he actually tweeted, you know, he should be on the plane, mate, or HRH or however he referred to him.
And I thought, Piers, have you spent so long hammering away at Harry and Andrew that you've forgotten that no one is a saint, not even the king and the next in line to the throne?
And yes, it was a chance for William to broaden his base.
And I'm afraid he scored a bit of an own goal.
Piers isn't here to defend himself.
But he did certainly tweet that.
You brought up Andrew there.
Now, Prince Andrew, this is what we've invited you to talk about.
Is this coming in for the cold?
What do you read into it?
Well, and Kinsley will be hot off the cause because she's stateside where they've just released this big tell-all or tell more documentary on Andrew, including interviews with Emily Maitlis, who of course delivered that.
It was meant to be a sort of courtroom style interview in Buckingham Palace, which hook line and sinkered Andrew.
But certainly there is more coming out.
I think the wish was from the prince that he could coolly hand over, was it about 12 million?
I think the sum undisclosed, including some money apparently from the late Queen, and it would all go away.
No such luck, Andrew.
And you might be up in Balmoral right now or heading up there, but that doesn't mean people aren't talking about you.
Let's come over to Kinsey then.
You brought her up.
Kinsey joins us.
Thanks so much from Stateside.
Time to bring Prince Andrew in.
What do you read into it?
I think he's still a liability to the royal family, perhaps more so than Prince Harry and Megan Markle.
You know, it was the Queen's wish that they could stop the bleeding when it came to this story.
And look at us today.
We've got hours and hours of additional interviews and people dissecting the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
I don't think, I know time heals all wounds, but we need more time when it comes to Prince Andrew.
I think that, you know, I just think that this was such a destructive, destructive incident.
And I do fear that it could be his legacy.
Destructive and internationally renowned.
Of course, let's cross over to Hilary as well and talk about the Prince Harry element in this because Tessa began by saying it's sort of almost like an own goal being scored.
You know, we've had Harry heading over to Singapore.
He's playing in a polo match.
He got criticism for that.
He's now, I believe, back in Montecito.
But this idea that he was going to print peace talks with King Charles, and that's now off the agenda.
Do you think we are going to see any sort of reconciliation?
Well, pleasure to be back with you again.
And good afternoon, stateside, as you mentioned, evening there.
But a few things.
The biggest news actually with regard to Harry is something that the mainstream media, and I don't know whether it's just that it's not quite public yet, the biggest news is with regard to Edward Long.
Edward Long was referred to in Prince Harry's sort of damn all autobiography, throwing the royal family under the proverbial bus.
He was referred to as the Bee.
He is one of the courtiers.
He was very loyal for many years to the Queen, our late beloved Queen.
Now, King Charles has honoured him.
He now will be Lord Young, and he now will be taking on royal events for the king in his absence.
So in abstentia, he will be made in the position of the king.
What does this mean?
This literally is taking sides.
It's saying who matters.
It's saying who has been dedicated to duty.
And it is not at all, obviously, what Prince Harry would ever have wanted.
So I think now you can see definitely where the lines are being drawn.
Now, the king, of course, has a big heart.
Obviously, most fathers would love to reconcile with their son, but I think this is a huge move we're seeing with regard to Lord Young.
I think you make an interesting point, Hillary, but in perhaps some ways you put two and two together and you make five.
Harry is not a working member of the royal family.
The likelihood of him rubbing up against Lord Long in the near future or the distant future is pretty minimal.
And actually, what needs repaired within the royal family are those personal relations between William, Charles and Harry.
And I think we've spent too long as a media, and I include all of us, lobbying criticism back at the Sussexes, at Andrew.
These guys, really, they're pretty irrelevant when it comes to the state institution that is the monarchy.
How do we go forward and future-proof that monarchy that I think all of us here believe in and make sure that things like Mexic, as people refer to it, or the Prince Andrew debacle that keeps on bleeding, as Kinsey put it, don't happen again.
And that, I believe, requires root and branch reform that we could push for in the press, that we could properly get down and dirty and look at what's working for that state institution, monarchy and what isn't.
But instead, we go in for this soap opaque show.
Ooh, look what Charles has appointed.
He's appointed a man that Harry won't like.
And it's actually, I don't think, helpful for anyone.
Let's bring in Kinsey.
Go on, Hillary.
I'll give you a chance to respond.
Go on.
Yes, Lord Young, not long.
I think it's very important to see the continuity.
I think it's very important to see what does matter.
And I think this is a great move in terms of what does matter.
And of course, Prince Harry isn't working anymore as a senior royal due to his own decision.
Yes.
Kinsey, want to bring you back in on this and ask about the other gentleman involved in probably a lot of these proposed peace talks and decisions.
Prince William, the brother of Prince Harry, quote, feels utterly betrayed by what Harry wrote about him in his book Spare and said about him on Netflix.
They were very close growing up.
It's been very painful for him, of course.
Do you think he is having an outsized role in this proposed reconciliation?
Well, that's certainly what the Daily Beast is reporting.
The Daily Beast is reporting that he is the one that stepped in and said that absolutely not.
They were not going to have peace talks with Prince Harry, that, you know, that incident that happened right after Prince Philip's funeral, that private moment where Prince William was begging him to please listen to him and his father, ends up in, you know, the first chapter of spare.
That's a complete violation of their privacy.
And, you know, I do believe that Prince William would likely prefer to keep a distance from Prince Harry at this point in time.
The Sussex brand is toxic and I don't think he trusts them.
Go on, Tessa.
Well, I hear that and I totally understand between siblings, it can get really personal.
But what you have with the institution of monarchy is it's a state gaffe and through those fault lines runs a family.
And sometimes William has to be encouraged to sit back to take a bigger view and think what looks best for monarchy.
What's actually going to work in terms of the monarchy going forward?
His father is defender of the faith.
He's meant to be a leading Christian.
That's meant to be about forgiveness, about reconciliation.
And I would like to see that from our monarchy, please.
Kinsey.
But do you not feel like it makes the entire monarchy look weak to take absolute kicks in the teeth between Netflix, between Spare, and then say, no, come on back, we'll take some more.
You know, not knowing confidently that things that they say in their presence might not end up spoken out loud to Oprah Winfrey on live television or end up in a podcast in the future.
I think they're protecting their brand.
I think they're protecting their sanity and their mental health.
Because, you know, I can't imagine what it's like to say things out loud and to have those secrets whispered on international television or in a podcast or book or Netflix series.
I think that they're trying to protect their future by distancing themselves.
And they're actually also doing the right thing, which is dedication to duty.
That's what they're doing.
They're keeping calm, they're carrying on and they're doing what the British public and members of the Commonwealth and everyone actually seems to admire.
Decent people dislike dishonesty and they respect and admire duty.
And you actually saw that also with recent polls with regard to Prince William, of course, in the US.
He was ranked even higher than President Biden and the King, and that's mainly a lot due to his dedication to duty.
And Hillary, we hear a great deal from those who really support the monarchy.
They have a loud voice, they have a loud voice in the establishment media, and rightly so, they're proud of that institution.
We don't hear from the 25% of us who actively want to see the end of monarchy.
I don't think, by the way, William helped his cause when he didn't think, oh, I'm going to sit on a plane for 22 hours.
It is a pain in the neck, but I'm going to do it because people like the 14-year-old kid that's going to be walking alongside my son's reign will buy into that and see that I gave up some of my holiday and did it.
And actually, what I think we need to be honest about is that the monarchy is operating from a position of strength.
So Kinsey referred to it, wouldn't they look weak?
But they have so much.
Their wealth, their status, they can afford to give a bit.
They are the ones that can give forward and step forward with the olive branch.
With regard to that 25%, I always think it's rather interesting, though, whenever the next question is asked, and you are right, there is a movement in the US.
Hillary, we're going to have to wrap it up there, unfortunately.
We have run out of time.
Sorry to cut you off there because we did want to hear the rest of it, but straight out of time.
Hilary, Tessa, Kinsey, thanks so much.
That is it from us.
Whatever you're up to tonight, make sure it is uncensored.
Good night.
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