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Telegraph
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Starmer's ‘synthetic voters' show Downing Street's lost the plot
In 1953 the communist government of East Germany was grappling with widespread unrest. It blamed the German public for not being appreciative enough of its political leadership. 'Would it not be simpler,' responded the playwright Bertolt Brecht, 'if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?' Brecht was joking, of course. But the sentiment came to mind when considering Labour's current approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The Spectator magazine reported this week that No10 is 'experimenting with 'synthetic voters' – fake focus groups of AI chatbots, who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. Instead of us telling the Government what we think, chatbots will ventriloquise on our behalf. The initiative is said to be the brainchild of the Prime Minister's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and, as this column noted last year, it is being championed by one of his predecessors, Dominic Cummings. A pioneer in this new field of synthetic voters is Ben Warner, the data guru who was a special adviser to the government between 2019 and 2021. Think of him as the Benji Dunn to Cummings' Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible. As Cummings enthused last year, with AI you could test your policy or message on synthetic voters and get feedback quickly and cheaply. Political advisers could ask a special AI chatbot what we think, and get an answer in seconds. No need to commission costly national polls or convene time-consuming focus groups. Underpinning today's AI chatbots are large language models, statistical predictors that are fine-tuned mimics. They have ingested vast amounts of other people's thoughts and creative work, and can generate a pastiche of them on demand. The hope is that this pastiche is now good enough to augment or even replace the responses of real human beings. '[If] you compare the output of that to an actual focus group transcript of people, most people can't tell the difference between the two,' claimed Cummings. Warner is doing just that in a new venture called Electric Twin, which says that it can capture the messy nuance of humanity with reliable precision. 'Our synthetic populations are carefully crafted simulations of real-world populations,' Electric Twin explains on its website. Its models 'see and engage the fragments, the outliers and the disenfranchised. They understand the misunderstood'. 'We think this is an exciting technology with huge benefits for the public sector and think it is great if No10 is experimenting with this technology,' Warner told me, though he said Downing Street was not using Electric Twin but some other technology. Downing Street didn't respond to a request for comment. Alas, synthetic voters may simply be making a problem worse. The chief critique of Sir Keir Starmer is that he is out of touch. Hiding behind a computer screen is unlikely to dispel that image. 'Societies feel unknowable … leaders and teams are frequently blindsided,' Electric Twin's website asserts. Forty years ago, that wasn't a problem. Politicians such as Thatcher, Healey and Foot revelled in open public hustings. They weren't scared of hearing what we thought. But political advisers became wary of their candidates making gaffes, and became obsessed with cosmetic presentation. Focus groups were a sign that the political class had lost confidence in its own ideas, or maybe even run out of them. Once MPs retreated behind a wall of consultants, no wonder the public became a mystery. With AI, the consultants have simply contrived a paid-for solution to a problem they created. However, it is difficult to see how the chatbots can help. The AI model can only be trained on what has already been said and written, so cannot originate authentic responses to new political ideas. For example, there is no corpus of public reaction to the idea that illegal immigrants to the UK should be sent to the Falkland Islands, for that idea has never been advanced. 'No doubt Starmer would prefer to inhabit a world in which an AI synthetic focus groups showed he and his policies were loved by the populace,' says the author Ewan Morrison, whose new dystopian thriller For Emma probes the post-human fantasies of the giant technology companies. 'The most dangerous thing is not that these AI surrogates develop some vast superintelligence, but that we lower ourselves to their level, becoming dependent on technologies that are riddled with inaccuracies,' he thinks. 'Today's AI is a synthetic slop information generator, so any government that incorporates this flawed technology will hit trouble.' Cummings, in his promotion of the concept last year, became visibly excited by extending the idea even further. He muses how chatbots could generate targeted videos aimed at specific demographics. He starts to say such an idea would be 'science fiction', but stops himself. This is rather a giveaway. Much like his determination to put giant data dashboards into Whitehall and turn the Government into a sci-fi control room, it's the ultimate fantasy of the consultant class to become the controller of our destiny, a mini master of the universe. But it's a very sterile view of the world in which we are not humans, just data to be filtered and processed. Why are Labour and Cummings so obsessed with this science fiction fantasy of AI as the solution to all their problems, following a script written by Silicon Valley? Maybe because, to paraphrase another poet and dramatist TS Eliot, the modern politician cannot bear very much reality.
Times
05-07-2025
- Times
This former East German city is Europe's most offbeat break right now
Some years ago, a decade or so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany went through a surge of Ostalgie — nostalgia for the former East. I remember checking into an Ossi-themed hotel in Berlin under a forbidding portrait of the last East German leader Erich Honecker, where guests paid good money for the frisson of being deliberately ignored by surly staff. Since then Berlin has been transformed, Leipzig has benefited from Berlin's overflow and Dresden has been rebuilt as pretty as a picture. But the fourth big-hitter among East German cities, the one that was the wealthiest in all Germany in the early 20th century, has been left behind. Arriving in Saxony's Chemnitz, about 200 miles south of Berlin, on a dark Monday night a couple of weeks ago was like stepping back 50 years, to the days when it was still called Karl-Marx-Stadt. The station was cavernous and mostly empty. The wide streets outside, walled by looming modernist/brutalist blocks, were practically devoid of life. It wasn't unexpected, that metaphorical chill in the air. I knew that Chemnitz was struggling, partly because of war damage, which destroyed 80 per cent of downtown. But also because its industry went belly up as the Wall came down, and partly because a mass exodus — 80,000 mostly well-educated citizens — left the 260,000 who remained feeling overlooked and unloved. But now there's Chemnitz 2025. Most European Capitals of Culture are not big tourism destinations these days. Last year, for example, we had Bodo, north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, a choice that surprised even the Norwegians. Instead, the designation goes to places that need a bit of a leg up, but can it do sufficient heavy lifting to redeem a former socialist utopia fallen on hard times? Can it turn Chemnitz, with its motto 'C the Unseen', into a destination worth the 'C-ing'? Fortunately, my second impressions were better than my first. When I met her at the Chemnitzerhof, a classically grand hotel that has seen better days, my city guide, Ramona Wagner, declared herself delighted by how busy she had become recently (room-only doubles from £107; Previously, her sporadic customers had a niche interest in what had been the crucible of the nation's industrial revolution, and in how Chemnitz's 19th-century textile and then machine-making industry had ended up producing trains and cars, the stuff of modern Germany. But nearly all of that has gone, either knocked down or repurposed. Wagner showed me a giant of a former cotton mill that was now the Chemnitz university library, a steam engine production factory that has become the Chemnitz 2025 visitor centre, and a tram repair workshop that is now a performance and exhibition space. Virtually the only showpiece of the era still used for its original purpose was the magnificent Bauhaus-influenced public swimming pool, unchanged since the glory period of the 1930s (£4; She left me where the giant head of Karl Marx presided over a wide boulevard originally intended for GDR showpiece parades. The 40-tonne bust had never really belonged, she said. It was bestowed on Chemnitz by the Soviet Union, along with his name, but Marx never set foot in the city. When the Wall came down, three quarters of the population voted for the name to go back to Chemnitz, but the head remains, presiding over this latest rebirth. Over an excellent steak in Alexxanders restaurant, I talked to Stefan Schmidtke, the local-born programme director of Chemnitz 2025 (mains from £20; He told me that the main point of the cultural year was to strengthen the local community. 'We're not importing celebrity artists,' he said. There would be no guest appearances by Yoko Ono. 'We just want to tell the world who we are.' • 16 of the world's most underrated cities Accordingly, there are a lot of community events, which can be a bit hit and miss for outsiders. For example, one of the flagship projects celebrates the city's 30,000 homemade garages. Back in GDR days, when a waiting list for a Trabant was ten years long, the new baby of the family, when it arrived, merited its own room. There are barbecues and pop-up exhibitions planned for these garage encampments, but you'd have to be lucky with your timing, otherwise they are just … garages ( One thing that Chemnitz does have in spades is museums, and the Industrial Museum in a magnificently restored former foundry has a copious cross-section of two centuries of manufacturing output (£8.50; But the outstanding show of the year, in a former bank called the Gunzenhauser, is European Realities, a nebulous title for an extraordinary selection of realist and magical realist paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, when Chemnitz was at its peak and when painting was still an Olympic event. Several floors of graphic and striking artworks collected from a wide range of unexpected countries (Croatia, Bulgaria) striving for a new identity have been brought together. The resulting window into the art of central and eastern Europe is well worth a wider airing (£12; • 10 of the best places to visit in Germany What Chemnitz 2025 has also done, aware that the city alone is not going to set the world on fire, is to include a substantial chunk of the surrounding countryside, luring visitors out of town by placing artworks in attractive locations, in a project it calls the Purple Path. At the organiser's suggestion, I set out on the excellent public transport system (a legacy of the socialist utopia) on a tram that morphed into a train, turning on a diesel engine and accelerating out into the Ore mountains, which are actually more like rolling hills. I was to meet the mayors of the small towns of Lössnitz and Zwönitz, both of whom had committed their communities to the Purple Path. Zwönitz felt like a village in Bavaria, well kept and peaceful, with many a fruit orchard and a traditional nightwatchman in robes, whose task was to go round the local restaurants on a Saturday night spreading conviviality. The installations here were lanterns of coloured socks suspended above a still pool in the woods, and a newly converted textile factory, the Buntspeicher, with changing exhibitions. • Read our full guide to Germany Lössnitz, even prettier and partly half-timbered, had its own little waterside craft brewery, a cobbled market square, a history of smuggling via local cellars, and one of the most compelling installations of the whole cultural year. Rebecca Horn's Universe in a Pearl is difficult to describe. The whole thing occupies the centre of a light-filled neo-gothic church that was previously in danger of demolition. At the top is a moon, below which hang golden cones ending in a big round mirror facing downwards. Then, three metres below it on the floor is another giant mirror facing upwards, which oscillates slowly. It's a hypnotic creation, in a perfect fit of a setting. And it has already — according to the delighted mayor Alexander Troll — brought 4,500 visitors a month to a town that didn't have any tourism. On the train/tram back to the city I found myself wondering whether any of Lössnitz's new visitors would make the long journey from the UK. Chemnitz 2025's focus as a cultural capital seems primarily for a domestic audience, particularly to restore some sense of self-respect to the local community, which is clearly needed, and worthwhile. But for an outsider? For someone interested in Germany in general, and in its recent history, then I'd say yes. It is certainly a journey of discovery. And a big blast from the past. Andrew Eames was a guest of the German National Tourist Office ( and Saxony Tourism ( Fly to Dresden Few visitors to Germany's most extravagant turreted castle, Neuschwanstein, realise that its 19th-century creator King Ludwig II was also responsible for several other flights of fancy in the foothills of the Alps. There's jewel-like Linderhof near Oberammergau; there's the King's House, a Turkish fantasy a hike up into the mountains at Schachen; and there's also Herrenchiemsee, a palace on an island in the middle of Chiemsee Lake. To visit them all is to see the best of Bavaria — and wonder at the King's lavish tastes. Stay in your own modern palace, Schloss Elmau in the countryside by B&B doubles from £389, minimum stay two nights ( Fly to Munich The new sleeper train from Brussels to Prague opens up an interesting city and country combination (from £43; The city is Dresden — also in Saxony like Chemnitz — the Florence on the Elbe, with a fleet of old paddlesteamers at its heart. After you've had your fill of the city's glorious arts and architecture, take one of those steamers — or the more prosaic train — upriver to the resort of Bad Schandau in the Elbe Sandstone mountains. Hiking trails here were much loved by poets and artists, including Germany's own Caspar David Friedrich. Stay at Bio-Hotel Helvetia in the village of Schmilka, which has its own Room-only doubles from £112 ( Take the train to Brussels Germany's Baltic coast, with long white sand beaches, was highly fashionable a century ago, but then along came cheap air travel. However, given the European heatwaves, the pendulum is swinging back again. The best of the beaches are on the island of Rügen and nearby Usedom, with temperatures in the early 20s. To truly recapture the spirit of how this coast once was, head for the Grand Hotel Heiligendamm, which was chosen by Angela Merkel to host 2007's G8 summit. Connected to the nearest town by a narrow gauge steam railway, the Molli, it is surrounded by beechwoods with sweeping lawns down to a sandy beach. Details B&B doubles from £254 ( Fly to Berlin The Black Forest is storyland Germany, but it is also a misnomer, because there's very little black about it, nor even all that much forest. Instead expect rolling hills, sumptuous geranium-splashed villages, great walking and fine eating, with several Michelin stars en route, particularly in the village of Baiersbronn, about an hour south of the spa resort of Baden Baden. Be sure to see the resort itself, with pavilions, fountains, casinos and thermal waters; and to drive the Schwarzwaldhochstrasse (the B500), a very scenic road across the mountains. Relax into the gorgeous Münstertal region south of Freiburg, all villages and valleys and campsites and nice little country hotels such as the Landgasthaus zur B&B doubles from £99 ( Fly to Basel
New York Times
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Günther Uecker, Who Punctuated His Art With Nails, Dies at 95
As a member of the three-man German collective Zero Group, Günther Uecker helped revolutionize postwar European art. In the early 1960s, tired of the dark colors and personal gestures that had dominated the previous decade, he and his partners, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, staged a number of international exhibitions filled with minimal paintings and sculptures that emphasized texture, movement and light. His own most famous series, though, was inspired by a dictum from an earlier revolution. 'Coming from East Germany, where I had been educated about the Russian Revolution of 1917,' Mr. Uecker recalled in 2017 in Apollo magazine, 'I was thinking about Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration that 'poetry is made with a hammer.'' In 1957, he hammered nails into the edges of a yellow monochrome painting so that they stuck out like spines or thorns. Those were the first of thousands more nails he would go on to hammer — into columns, wooden spheres, chairs, televisions and canvases painted white. Like other artists in the broader movement he spearheaded with Mr. Mack and Mr. Piene, Mr. Uecker wanted his materials, and the purity of a simple gesture, to speak for themselves. Mr. Uecker's approach was rich with symbolic and philosophical resonance. It made visible the sustained, almost violent effort it takes to shape the world with one's hands, and the power of repetition to bring about complexity. Every nail rose from its surface in a rigid, invariant line, but together they also cast shadows, formed intricate patterns and stood at various angles. They even had room for the kind of expressive gestures Mr. Uecker and his colleagues had ostensibly rejected: In his 5-foot-square 'White Bird,' made in 1964, hundreds of nails driven into a white canvas resembled both a flock of starlings and the shadow of a single flying bird. Mr. Uecker died on June 10 in Düsseldorf. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Jacob. He was 95. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Times
26-06-2025
- General
- Times
Cold War watchtower for sale. It's a bit of a fixer-upper
By the standards of the auctioneer trade, the listing for the period property in rural Brandenburg is strikingly restrained. Situated in the 'picturesque' district of Cumlosen with 'numerous opportunities for nature lovers', it says, the five-storey building is of solid construction but requires quite considerable repairs and renovation work. All offers in excess of €5,000 are welcome. The sober language has a lot to do with the period in question: during the Cold War, the structure was built as a watchtower to prevent people from fleeing communist East Germany across the River Elbe. The listed building, which will be sold on Friday by the German federal government's auctions agency, consists of a tiled ground-floor hallway with an office annex, and concrete and iron staircases leading up to what used to be the guards' lounges and the observation deck on the top floor. The total indoor space is 180 sq m (1,940 sq ft). Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the watchtower overlooked the frontier between East and West. Many people on the socialist German Democratic Republic's (GDR) side of the Elbe valley in this region had their homes demolished and were resettled. Stretches of the riverbank were fenced off with barbed wire and there was a 9pm curfew. That did not prevent some East Germans from swimming across the river, or even crossing it on foot when it froze over. After the collapse of the GDR, the watchtower at Cumlosen was transferred to the federal government and abandoned, with much of the guards' electrical equipment left to moulder in the basement. It has been repeatedly vandalised and the paint is peeling from the walls. The building has often been vandalised and paint is peeling from the walls OLIVER GIERENS/DPA/ALAMY LIVE NEWS However, the local district council in Prignitz said it had received a number of expressions of interest from potential buyers. 'It is certainly a subject that interests many people,' Bernd Atzenroth, the council's spokesman, told RBB, the regional public broadcaster. The district tourism association has suggested that the watchtower, which is located on a fairly popular cycle path along the bank of the Elbe, could be converted into a visitor centre.
BBC News
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The History Hour Jaws and the Charleston church shooting
Available for over a year Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This programme includes outdated and offensive language. It's 50 years since the original Jaws film was released in cinemas across America. The movie premiered on 20 June 1975. Our guest is Jenny He, senior exhibitions curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She tells us about the history of this blockbuster movie. We also hear from Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote the screenplay. Also, the story of the women who were forcibly detained in sexual health clinics across East Germany, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and the 1964 civil rights swimming protest that ended when acid was poured into the pool. Finally, the horrific account of Polly Sheppard who was a survivor of the Charleston church shooting in South Carolina, USA in 2015. Contributors: Carl Gottlieb - Jaws co-writer. Jenny He - senior exhibitions curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Sabine - one of the women forcibly detained and abused in a sexual health clinic in East Germany. Archive of William Norman Ewer - journalist who attended the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Archive of JT Johnson and Mimi Jones -activists in a civil rights swimming protest . Polly Sheppard- survivor of the Charleston Church shooting. This programme contains movie excerpts from the 1975 film which was a Universal Picture, a Zanuck/Brown production and directed by Steven Spielberg. (Photo: Steven Spielberg on the set of the film 'Jaws' in 1975. Credit: Archive Photos/Stringer)
