For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working.

An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025.

Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself.

However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.

Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent "crisis meetings", working on weekends, and "super cut-throat" performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go.

"You go in on Saturday or Sunday just to catch up or make sure things aren't broken," the person said.

Another fortnight, another British Prime Minister, but there is one firm point of continuity: Ukraine. Keir Starmer’s last day in office was spent in Kyiv, where as a parting gift he announced another £255 million of funding, reaffirming his ‘unwavering’ support for the war effort. Just seven days after Andy Burnham took office, he hosted President Zelensky as his first international visitor, intoning that Britain was still ‘one hundred percent’ behind him. The signal to the Euro-Atlantic establishment was clear. Whichever fraction of the British political class happens to be in government — Johnson or Sunak, Starmer or Burnham — they will continue this endless proxy war.

These incantations are becoming increasingly absurd as the conflict drags on inconclusively. John Healey, now pulling the nation’s pursestrings, has said that the defence of Britain begins in Ukraine. The House of Commons Library estimated that Britain’s financial assistance to the country as of February of this year was £21.8 billion, with £13.06 billion in military financing. This includes offensive military equipment and long range strike capabilities. In 2024 Starmer allowed Ukraine to use British-French Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep into Russia, in what amounted to a significant escalation. NATO weapons and intelligence are used by the Ukrainians to strike energy facilities, warehouses and other targets on Russian territory.

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Nor can one find mainstream discussion of the dangers posed by the intense proxy war we are waging. Were Russia providing long-range weaponry to a third country striking energy facilities and cities within Britain, we would of course be at war by now. What happens if Russia decides to end its policy of containing the conflict to Ukraine and to strike at NATO weapons depositories in Poland and Romania? We already know the answer. Armies start wars and citizens finish them. It may be in the interests of the British political class to pursue a policy of escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed Great Power — if only to please Washington — but it is not in ours.

That’s why peace advocates should be pushing for an end to the proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. While we will get little hearing in Parliament or in the mainstream press, that makes it all the more necessary to raise our voices above the throng of reckless jingoists. A foreign policy rooted in the interests of the British people would support a negotiated end to the conflict and an immediate halt on weapons and funding to Ukraine. For the past four and a half years, those committed to this unwinnable war have been on the moral high ground. It’s about time that we dislodged them.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has approved the US use of some UK bases for "defensive" air strikes on Iran, in a continuation of a policy introduced by his predecessor Keir Starmer, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

According to sources who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity, Starmer held a meeting of senior ministers and officials on Friday, in which it was decided that US planes could continue to use bases at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.

The sources said that Burnham was briefed on the discussion and agreed with the decision, confirming that he would likely continue Starmer’s policy throughout the renewed US operations.

The decision comes as US bombardment targeted cities across Iran for the 11th consecutive night, with Iranian media reporting explosions in cities including Bushehr, Tabriz and Chabahar and in the provinces of Kurdistan and Ilam.

[...]

But Burnham's continuation of Starmer's policy of allowing American use of British airbases is likely to face backlash, as UK rights groups previously warned that the move could violate international law.

Starmer announced his policy in early March, arguing that the bases were to be used for defensive purposes.

He later confirmed that the agreement would be expanded to allow for the US to launch strikes from UK bases on Iranian sites targeting the Strait of Hormuz - also invoking "collective self-defence" of Gulf state allies as a legal basis for the decision.

Human Rights Watch's UK director, Yasmine Ahmed, wrote to the prime minister, highlighting that the government’s legal justification for the move failed to mention issues related to international humanitarian law (IHL).

She cited a number of instances which have raised questions around US compliance with IHL, including an air strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, at the start of the US-Israeli assault on 28 February. Over 150 people were killed in the attack, most of them children.

Tony Blair’s treasury secretary Alistair Darling told the prime minister that buying aircraft carriers was a “political” rather than a military choice and would mean less funding for social services.

Declassified files from 1998, Blair’s first full year in government, contain deliberations among officials and ministers on Labour’s manifesto commitment to replace Britain’s three aircraft carriers with the two new ones the UK currently possesses.

Darling wrote to Blair in June 1998 about the carriers and the aircraft to go on them, at a time when their cost was estimated at over £20bn.

He said: “The US already possesses a substantial capability in this area: sufficient to meet any likely future coalition requirement. It is therefore clear that whether the UK needs to contribute in this way is a political rather than military question”.

Darling added that the £20bn price tag was “huge” and “would mean there would be less scope for redirecting funding to our priorities in health and education”.

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Britain formally launched two new aircraft carriers – HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales – in 2017 and 2019, at a cost of £6.3bn. The new warplanes to be put on them were estimated in 2018 to cost a further £13bn.

Lord Richards, a former chief of defence staff, told journalist Richard Norton-Taylor that the carriers were “behemoths…unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”. They have since been plagued by serious mechanical problems.

The British political and media establishment is currently demanding an increase in military spending to face the alleged rise in threats to national security. Yet the files suggest that the motives for Britain having a strong military are not always those publicly claimed by officials.

A “strong” defence policy “gives us the lead on defence in Europe, ensures US respect and guarantees our high standing in the world more widely”, Blair’s foreign policy adviser John Sawers, wrote to Tony Blair in June 2001. Sawers would go on to become chief of MI6.

Blair’s defence secretary Geoff Hoon told his boss something similar in June 2003, saying that “our armed forces are a key lever… to influence US strategy”, referring at the time to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Before performing the study, the developers in question expected the AI tools would lead to a 24 percent reduction in the time needed for their assigned tasks. Even after completing those tasks, the developers believed that the AI tools had made them 20 percent faster, on average. In reality, though, the AI-aided tasks ended up being completed 19 percent slower than those completed without AI tools.

By analyzing screen recording data from a subset of the studied developers, the METR researchers found that AI tools tended to reduce the average time those developers spent actively coding, testing/debugging, or “reading/searching for information.” But those time savings were overwhelmed in the end by “time reviewing AI outputs, prompting AI systems, and waiting for AI generations,” as well as “idle/overhead time” where the screen recordings show no activity.

Overall, the developers in the study accepted less than 44 percent of the code generated by AI without modification. A majority of the developers reported needing to make changes to the code generated by their AI companion, and a total of 9 percent of the total task time in the “AI-assisted” portion of the study was taken up by this kind of review.

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On the surface, METR’s results seem to contradict other benchmarks and experiments that demonstrate increases in coding efficiency when AI tools are used. But those often also measure productivity in terms of total lines of code or the number of discrete tasks/code commits/pull requests completed, all of which can be poor proxies for actual coding efficiency.

Many of the existing coding benchmarks also focus on synthetic, algorithmically scorable tasks created specifically for the benchmark test, making it hard to compare those results to those focused on work with pre-existing, real-world code bases. Along those lines, the developers in METR’s study reported in surveys that the overall complexity of the repos they work with (which average 10 years of age and over 1 million lines of code) limited how helpful the AI could be. The AI wasn’t able to utilize “important tacit knowledge or context” about the codebase, the researchers note, while the “high developer familiarity with [the] repositories” aided their very human coding efficiency in these tasks.

Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

The construction plans include building new bunkers in Suffolk, which will seemingly be used to store nuclear weapons, and modernising facilities to help covert units run secret operations.

The US military is also planning to upgrade its base in Gloucestershire, from which waves of powerful bombers attacked Iran earlier this year on the orders of Donald Trump.

The plans highlight the breadth of the US military and security establishment’s footprint in the UK, where more than 12,000 US military personnel are spread around at least 15 bases and facilities.

There are questions about whether Britain should continue to host the US installations on its soil.

For more than seven decades, successive governments have seen the bases as a foundation of the UK’s military partnership with the US.

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Another $1.1bn is earmarked for Mildenhall airbase in Suffolk, at which about 4,000 American military personnel are stationed. During this year’s US-Israeli war on Iran, the base played an important part in facilitating bombing missions. Huge planes flew from the base to the Mediterranean to refuel other airborne aircraft flying to and from Iran.

Less visible are the covert forces based at Mildenhall. They are tasked with flying special operatives into what they call “hostile, denied and/or politically sensitive territories” across Europe and Africa.

An unspecified portion of the $1.1bn earmarked for Mildenhall will fund the construction of purpose-built facilities, to enable these special forces to house their aircraft in one place. This, according to the Pentagon, will enable the forces to react more rapidly in a crisis.

Nearly $500m is to be spent at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, which played a vital role in US bombing raids on Iran this year.

The base has a very long runway, at almost 2 miles, and is reinforced to withstand heavy bombers, such as the B-1 and B-52, which can carry huge payloads, including the so-called “bunker buster” bombs.

This enabled the bombers to take off from Fairford instead of the US, cutting out thousands of miles.

The long-awaited defence investment plan boosts military spending by £15 billion, an increase of £1.5bn over the last two weeks, extra cash wrung out of the Treasury by new Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis.

And Mr Jarvis confirmed that the figure will rise further to 3 per cent of gross domestic product in the next parliament, and to 3.5 per cent by 2035.

The extra cash is to be splurged on drones above all, as well as fighter jets, nuclear arms and a larger weapons stockpile.

Investment in roads and energy projects are the immediate victims of the military increases, Sir Keir announced, amid rumours that his next stop after Downing Street may be as secretary-general of Nato.

Campaigners condemned the announcements, which were also designed to tie the hands of premier-presumptive Andy Burnham.

Stop the War Coalition vice-chair Chris Nineham said: “Never mind the cost-of-living crisis or the collapsing services he leaves behind, Starmer wants to be remembered as the man who ramped up spending on weapons to record levels.

“He claims he doesn’t want war, but that the best way to avoid it is to be prepared for it. This is a transparent lie.

“It is clear that security, defence and the fantasy and implausible threat from Russia, which is constantly talked up by ministers, generals and arms companies, are now the main ways that the ruling classes are justifying attacks on social programmes, on welfare and working-class living standards in favour of still more missiles.

“And that is why any effective campaign against public sector and welfare cuts needs to be making anti-war arguments.

Newly released documents reveal the inner workings of Labour Together and its role in covertly undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party.

The documents were disclosed to Corbyn in response to a subject access request. They contain emails from Labour Together’s two key figures Morgan McSweeney and Josh Simons.

McSweeney went on to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff while Simons became a cabinet minister until he resigned following revelations that he had hired a reputation management firm to “proactively undermine” journalistic investigations into Labour Together, McSweeney and Sir Keir Starmer.

Simons subsequently vacated his Makerfield constituency seat for Andy Burnham.

Internal documents detail how Labour Together under McSweeney’s watch (2017-20) conducted polling of the Labour membership to monitor its views on the incidence of antisemitism in the party.

This polling allowed McSweeney and his allies to track responses to the antisemitism narrative that they were simultaneously helping to sustain by placing arguably alarmist stories in the media.

The documents further detail how The Canary media outlet was highly trusted among Labour members and identified as a political challenge because it defended Corbyn amid antisemitism accusations.

The Canary was subsequently targeted by the McSweeney-linked Stop Funding Fake News campaign with an advertiser boycott, which helped to diminish its revenue.

[...]

The results of two polls conducted in November 2018 and July 2019 suggest the Labour membership was sceptical of the “antisemitism crisis” narrative.

For instance, 76% of respondents believed in November 2018 that the crisis was either “deliberately exaggerated” or effectively non-existent and being “hyped” to damage Corbyn and protect Israel.

This dropped marginally to 71% seven months later despite a firestorm of media coverage.

McSweeney appeared to be displeased with the poll results, writing in one 2018 email that “there is nothing at the moment to suggest that Corbyn is challengeable before 2022 but equally there is every reason to be optimistic about what happens next”.

He added that Corbyn’s “absolute numbers are still very high (68%) particularly given his dreadful performance on Brexit and antisemitism”.

[...]

When read against other emails and Labour Together’s polling, the briefing note points to concerns about how The Canary was undermining the antisemitism narrative that McSweeney and his allies were covertly helping to inflame in this period.

In March 2019, McSweeney and his ally Imran Ahmed would launch the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) campaign, which sought to demonetise The Canary by pressuring companies to withdraw advertising from its website.

While being led by factional Labour insiders, the SFFN campaign presented itself as a project run by committed grassroots activists who were concerned with the proliferation of “fake news”.

Interestingly, the internal briefing note, which appears to have been a precursor to the SFFN campaign, made no mention of the accuracy of The Canary’s reporting.

The emphasis was on its political influence, strongly suggesting the subsequent campaign was initiated in response to The Canary’s challenge to the political ambitions of Labour Together, onto which claims of “disinformation” were grafted.

Indeed, McSweeney reportedly told Labour Together colleagues: “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us”.

The judges acknowledged that the proscription of Palestine Action was controversial, adding: “We recognise too that Palestine Action is supported by many otherwise law-abiding citizens, and that it is engaged in peaceful as well as non-peaceful protest. It is, nonetheless, a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism.

“It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties. Palestine Action’s activities have caused injury as well as property damage.”

Reminder that suffragettes had in fact used bombs and tried to assassinate the Prime Minister of the time.

A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools.

The preprint research, done by Hal Triedman, Tingwei Zhang, and Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell University, is called “Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content” and provides a mechanism and research basis for a problem that has been noticed by Reddit moderators and Wikipedia editors, namely that their websites are getting flooded with promotional content from brands trying to do AEO, or AI-engine optimization. 404 Media has repeatedly reported on this booming industry, in which brands try to promote their product by seeding the websites that AI tools most often cite and scrape from with inauthentic and spammy content.

The Cornell research finds that deep research agents, which are the real-time scrapers that tools like Google AI search and ChatGPT use to retrieve web content with citations in response to user queries, cite user-generated content from sites like Reddit or Wikipedia in roughly half of all queries, and that nearly a quarter of all citations come from user-generated websites. The paper suggests that what we have been seeing is basically Redditor suggests you put glue on your pizza as a service, or an end-to-end attack against the systems that increasingly dominate the ways that people access information online. The researchers found that “a single poisoned Reddit comment can influence generated outputs for an entire cluster of related [AI] queries,” the paper said.

“We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, Facebook, etc. can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently,” Triedman told 404 Media.