Wow! Apple’s “Dark Matter” and its AI journalism prompt
In this mind-bending Apple TV+science fiction thriller, Dark Matter, which has attracted wide and critical acclaim, a university physics professor is abducted through a portal that his alternative self from another time has created.
Reason?
His alternative self craves the timeline and family-love in his other world — one he’s so far been denied.
Sounds trippy, but its rationale comes from a thought experiment based around Quantum physics that matter can exist in different states. Ergo humans are matter so then can they? That’s the membrane writer Blake Crouch has intriguingly pushed.
Dark Matter conceptualises how a physical black cube based around a famous science experiment (Schrödinger’s cat paradox) manifests as a physical portal . Yet it’s also a mental one, a sort of dream tunnel where we all experience often unexplained mind warping adventures.
I’m a chemistry and maths graduate turned journalism professional and innovator, then academic who practices and writes at the interstices of innovation, future and social.
Dark Matter provides synergies for what I’m about to write about in a forthcoming presentation in a July conference in Storytellers and Machines. It comes from lived experiences, and for that we need to go back in time and location, and introduce myself.
Memory
If you’re ever visiting South Africa pay Katlehong a visit. It’s one of the largest townships in the country, 28 km south-east of Johannesburg, with popular tourism attractions and great vistas. Its home to some 400,000 people and some of the country’s most talented and creative people.
Its celebrities include Makgotso Monyemorathoe who starred in The Woman King (2022), National footballer Sibusiso Khumalo, and Musician Sizwe Moeketsi Moniker (AKA Reason) who released “Top Seven” sampling Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture”. Give it a listen.
I’d like to go back to Katlehong because the last memories I had of it were in 1993, just over thirty years ago, as a freelance correspondent for the BBC World Service.
On a dark, cold, thundery night I opted to accompany peace monitors driving for hours in the night in their attempt to quell violence between political factions.
On that night, journalists and peace monitors huddled, prayed and then we signed death certificates absolving any authorities of blame should anything go wrong. It wasn’t the first time I had taken such risks.
Some months earlier, I did similar going down one of South Africa’s deepest mines. It took over an hour to descend its 3km plus shaft and what awaited us was a giant underground city.
Katlehong was one of my most memorable and dangerous assignments. I remember it like yesterday. Half way through the mission, driving in an armoured truck renamed Dove One, we were met with a man crouching in the distance. It was dark and we could hardly see him, so the mission leader handed us night vision goggles.
The crouched man started to aim his Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) at us. At that moment Dove One shone its bright light beam onto him and called him out to stop. Fortunately he did.
The Peace monitors would go onto do tremendous work. Katlehong could easily have been a spark for more widespread turmoil. I left South Africa in 1994 reporting on Nelson Mandela’s inauguration, thirty years ago last week.
Other assignments would follow to various degrees of danger e.g. Syrian border, Tunisia, Egypt; some more benign, but no less intriguing, such as Russia, China and India.
Applying AI
In telling this story, I’m relying on memory. To be precise Long Term Memory that can be delineated into explicit memory, which is conscious memory for recalling specific facts and events and its subset of episodic memory which is personal experiences and events from your life.
The question is how can you believe me? The default for conscious reasoning used to be, to believe what someone said, at least largely from the 17th Century onwards.
To that we deployed examples of our work and recommendations. Such as these which features former news anchor Jon Snow
But how much do endorsements like this work? What if you don’t know Jon Snow or care for the others? We’ll need something else for you to trust me, particularly in an AI world.
The heightened disinformation era that’s evolved unchecked within the online/offline space requires us to be more skeptical, to acquire greater evidence and trust. De facto human behaviour is being reverse engineered. Artificial Intelligence exacerbates the risks. But could Generated AI (GAI) be used in Journalism and how can we trust it?
Irrespective of the current dilemma or lack of deployment posed by GAI, its wider use in journalism is just a matter of time. In 2032, it will be a moot point. And if that’s difficult to believe, cast your mind back. Here I open three innovations I’ve experienced close and personally.
- Videojournalism would never work, because it would be impossible for a journalist to film, interview and direct to an acceptable standard said the industry. The BBC dismissed it and then adopted it five years after it was introduced in the UK in 1994.
- Multimedia would never become a primary platform for content, because firstly it would be incapable of transmitting video. In 2005 I built one of the first video magazine platforms in the UK.
- Social Media would reframe what was news and interesting, and it’s only until it terrified the professional industry with the audiences it was amassing that it was taken seriously.
In each of these, journalism’s elite tried to prescribe what would work and wouldn’t. They were wrong. GAI will become the norm in the same way Social Media did. Citing American technology writer and columnist Dan Gillmor speculating on the future of Social Media in an interview with me, he said “it will happen because it can”.
So what if parts of GAI in Journalism could be viewed as memory? A series of checks and balances ranging from users using their real names, against a matrix of data and an index would be required.
A year ago I discovered rare archive of my work from thirty years ago. Working with a professional archivist José Velázquez we submitted it to a global body FIAT/ IFTA as part of a global competition. It won. FIAT/ IFTA said it was historically important.
In the batch were the audio recordings of that night time drive and using AI I’ve constructed from my memory scenes I remember. What you’re seeing here is what I recall. Imagine it an artits impression. This is my memory intelligence. However, in time brain-emulated AI and much better control of GAI will strengthen the experience of transferring thoughts.
Like I said we’re entering a Dark Matter realm.
But in fact it goes even further, something that will become all too prevalent in creating non-fiction stories, and the reason for doing so are as much financial as they are the social will.
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AI Generated Image of David’s alter-ego from http://www.viewmagazine.tv/GenAI.html
