tim's experiment

The other night I was deceived by my clock. I should perhaps explain that Chez Hamlett we still have a clock which hangs on the wall. This habit originated many years ago when our son was very small and insisted on a cuckoo clock.

The rather annoying mechanical bird expired quite quickly, thank goodness, and the empty hook was taken over by a silent station clock with a pendulum. The pendulum was purely ornamental and stopped working a long time ago without affecting the function of the clock.

The station clock finally grew tatty after decades of faithful service and was replaced by a simple, and cheap, version from Ikea; this is nothing fancy and just has the basic 12 numbers and two hands.

The clock is easily visible from my desk so I tend to use it despite the competition provided by my wristwatch, computer and telephone, all of which will happily tell the time if asked.

So it came about that I was watching a particularly riveting episode of Killing Eve on Netflix, and this was followed by another riveting episode, and another, during which time apparently stood still. Surely it could not still be 10.30? Indeed it was not. The clock had stopped and needed a new battery.

This was harmless enough. I no longer have to get up to go to work so a late night is nothing to lose sleep over, as it were. It was chastening to find how easily you could be deceived by a simple piece of machinery, even when it was easy enough to check.

Of course there was no malice here. The clock was not being mischievous. Phones, keyboards and mice all need attention to their electricity needs and will refuse to perform unless regularly fed. Battery-operated items of the traditional kind need changes, the car needs petrol, and so it goes.

Yet this is the age of deceptive machinery. This is not a completely new thing. Stalin used to have purge victims painted out of official photography. People wondered whether Robert Capa’s shot militiaman was really … well, shot. One news photographer of my acquaintance admitted that he always took a small stuffed toy on disaster assignments because pictures of ruins looked so much more poignant with an abandoned plaything in them.

The distinguished war photographer Tim Page mused in his memoirs whether it was acceptable to photograph a dead soldier under a poncho, and if so whether it was also acceptable to rearrange the poncho to improve the picture.

At a more homely level I once congratulated the chief photographer of the Morecambe Visitor, where I was a naive and newly recruited sports editor, on the frequency with which he and his colleagues managed to capture the goal-scoring moment, with the ball flying past the goalkeeper’s flailing fingers. He then explained that this was due to technical skill rather than timing; the diving goalkeeper was genuine but the ball was inserted in the darkroom while the picture was being printed.

On the whole though, with due allowance for the possibility that people posed when they knew they were being pictured, photographs were regarded as more or less reliable records of what people did and looked like.

I was always more suspicious of TV and film, because of early exposure to the amount of setting up and technical preparation involved in quite simple bits of moving picture. If the scene was supposed to be “real” you were to some extent dependent on the honesty of the enterprise, and needed to remember that out of the picture were “the crew”. Over the years the crew has shrunk. In my early RTHK days there was a producer/director, cameraman, sound man, lights man, man in charge of the props, just in case any were needed, and the driver of the van required by all these people and me. Nowadays you may be interviewed by a reporter with a phone.

Anyway we have changed all that. The moment when I realised that you could no longer rely at all on video came when I watched a Youtube video of cats doing Olympic dives off a springboard. This was not an attempt at deception – nobody was going to buy the idea of human-sized cats – it was just a display of what you could do with AI.

Which is, it seems, practically anything. Nothing can be relied on any more. Idiots who believe Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring out of a Washington pizzeria can now order up a video of Mrs C ushering dazed kids into the basement for unmentionable purposes.

Lying by machinery has now become so common that they seem to be genuinely frightened of each other. How else can we explain the constant insistence that the ordinary human netizen should prove he or she is “not a robot”.

This is infuriating. The usual test used to be a mosaic of nine tiny pictures, which you were supposed to tick if they had a bicycle or a traffic light in them. Sometimes they wanted you to look for a ”crosswalk”, something unknown to English English. But until you had passed the picture test you could not Google it.

We now seem to have moved on to a bit of cursive writing, which you are supposed to decipher and type in the space provided. I imagine this is difficult for any robot; it regularly defeats me. Alternatively you can listen to something and type that.

The resulting burst of sound is completely incomprehensible. I must in fairness acknowledge that this may be because my VPN places me in a carefully selected and very neutral Scandinavian city. I do not speak Swedish. What tangled webs we are all weaving these days.