Lord of the Lies

That image comes from Peter Brook's masterly 1963 screen adaption of William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. Frustrated viewers of BBC TV's recent dismal serialised version of the novel may have switched to the 1963 adaption and been entranced by the haunting Kyrie Eleison soundtrack theme, as well as the genius of Peter Brook's cinematography. If those viewers then asked the Google AI agent about the music, they would receive the response seen below.
At the time of writing this post, the Google AI agent states "While the film's official credits attribute the music to Raymond Leppard, the primary "Kyrie" theme used throughout the movie was actually composed by Sir Malcolm Arnold". Which is wrong: Sir Malcolm composed many great movie soundtracks, but Lord of the Flies was not one of them. Articles elsewhere online correctly reference my 2008 article about Raymond Leppard's score, and, if anyone still believes Google's AI agent, Leppard's score is seen at the foot of this post.

Before dismissing this Google AI 'information' as just more AI slop, it is worth drilling down and finding the source of the error. The source is the Wikipedia entry for the movie seen below, which incorrectly states that Sir Malcolm Arnold composed the kyrie them.
Yes, just one small error that is not really that serious. But there are some serious implications. It is fashionable to denigrate AI slop. However in this case AI simply replicated humanoid slop. Everything on Wikipedia, and on any crowd-sourced and crowd-edited platform, needs to be treated with grave suspicion. But the error above is pretty remarkable even for Wikipedia's many remarkable errors, because it is not cross-referenced. 

As Harvard University tells its students "...you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia... information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration". Personally I never reference Wikipedia because it contains so many errors, and it alarms me that this dubious source is recommended to students, and is at the top of search engine rankings. Yes, I am well aware I could edit that incorrect Wikipedia entry, and, in all probability, someone will soon after this post appears. But some years ago I crossed swords with Wiki's rabid self-appointed 'editors', and it is not an experience I want to repeat.   

Then there is another important point. AI is only as good, and importantly only as bad, as the dataset it scans. So human slop in, AI slop out. As happened in this example. Don't blame AI. Blame the online 'expert editors'. But do blame AI for not differentiating between crowd-sourced content, and authoritative sources.  As Harvard University explains "Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration". 

Finally, we need to look at the bigger picture. AI, Wikipedia, and similar developments - Grokipedia anyone? - will not go away. In fact they will become more pervasive. We are moving from Trump's post-truth age to a post-reality age. Reality, as defined by new technologies, is now fluid - edit the data set and you edit reality. To research this article I fired a number of queries about the soundtrack for Lord of the Flies at the Google AI assistant. All the responses perpetuated the error, but the wording and links from the responses varied every time, even though I used identical search terms. 

Tomorrow Wikipedia will be edited, which will offer a new and different reality on the soundtrack's composer. As William Golding explains in Chapter Five of the novel: "The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away".
       

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