MY experience of artificial intelligence (AI) feels like the big tech firms are following the “junk food model,” where the food industry promoted superficially attractive super-processed products loaded with sugar, fat and salt to make customers dependent on them, even though they are unhealthy.

The tech industry is making a similar turn. For example, Google is a brilliant searchable index to the web with ingenious rankings. It takes us to the many WWW “pages,” where we can decide their value. But Google now pushes an AI version, a power grab where it keeps us on Google to read their pre-digested AI summaries of some pages.

Our judgement is gone, but their AI summaries have no judgement — because AI is just an imitation of thought — and are often absurdly wrong.

Similarly, Microsoft or Adobe invented powerful document-creating tools, but they now want to push pre-digested AI “summaries” to lock us into their low-quality “data.”

So it was worrying to see information technology firms swamping Labour conference pushing AI. This “IT crowd” were funding dozens and dozens of meetings to try to persuade Labour ministers and MPs that AI solves everything. Labour’s leadership didn’t seem to need much persuading.

The “IT crowd” had a bunch of demands for the government: they want the government to give them contracts to run public services, both for the money and because these government contracts will validate and promote their AI systems.

They want the government cash but also want the contracts to help them market AI on “if it’s good enough for the government, then it is good enough for you” terms. They would be happy for the government to agree to regulatory “standards” for AI with the industry, because this will help them overcome fear of their product.

They want help with investment, whether that’s direct money from public funds like the British Business Bank, or support for their investments, like planning support for their “big data” sheds.

I went to three AI-industry funded events and could have gone to many more. Each time Labour’s leaders jumped on board the tech bros’ bus. Key Starmer group Labour Together held a meeting with the AI-boosting title “Delivering Growth Through AI,” with Kanishka Narayan, the minister for AI.

The whole event was funded by Microsoft. In return for its money, Hugh Milward, Microsoft’s top British lobbyist, got to speak on the platform next to Narayan. The science minister also seemed like he was doing PR for big tech himself. Narayan claimed Labour was pushing “progressive values” against reactionaries who were just making up “grievances.”

He argued that “AI is central to that vision of progressive dynamism,” and that AI is so “radically transformative that it will trump a lot of the confected grievances” of right-wing populists. Narayan was claiming AI will deliver such incredible improvement to the economy and public services that the “unprogressive” populists of both left and right will melt away.

Even inside the Labour Together meeting pod, this boosterism disturbed delegates. The first questions from the floor emphasised the danger AI might force people out of jobs or embed prejudice, while AI data “sheds” would suck up badly needed electricity and water. Luckily, Microsoft spin doctor Milward was able to argue these problems away from the platform.

Fittingly, given the comparison between junk food and AI, Milward was previously McDonald’s British head of “public affairs.”

Cognizant, a US-Indian tech outsourcer, paid the New Statesman to hold a fringe meeting on “Can public-private collaboration use the power of AI to unlock economic growth?” with Emily Darlington MP, a member of the science committee, alongside a representative of the tech-evangelist Tony Blair Institute.

Cognizant has worrying aspects in its record. In 2021, it paid $25 million to settle charges from the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it had organised over $3m in bribes for Indian politicians to back its business.

Cognizant has faced repeated charges of dismal working conditions for its staff — most strikingly in 2019, tech website The Verge reported Cognizant staff doing content moderation for Facebook at two US sites were so under pressure dealing with dismal, offensive trash posts that their mental health was suffering, leading to widespread drug and alcohol abuse. Cognizant dropped its Facebook work after the expose.

None of this was raised at the meeting. Instead, Darlington promoted the idea that public AI contracts were key to growing our private AI industry. The MP said: “If we are using it [AI] as a government in making sure that you have better access to and delivery of our services” this was key to “building confidence” in the AI industry generally.

From the platform, Yatin Mahandru, Cognizant’s British vice-president for public sector deals, promoted his company and its increasing number of British public contracts.

Meanwhile, privatiser Capita paid Progressive Britain — the Blairite group formerly known as Progress — to hold a meeting on “How AI is making public services better” with DWP “transformation” minister Andy Western, speaking alongside Richard Holroyd, CEO of Capita Public Services.

In fairness, this was a more practically focused meeting because some local government leaders who have used AI in public services were present on the platform.

But still, the overall sense that AI, especially through outsourcing, would radically improve public services was strong, which, given Capita’s record, is a bold belief.

There is a strong possibility that AI is a “bubble.” Some big investors are starting to worry that AI can sell shares at big prices but won’t deliver enough actual “value” to justify the investment. The ministers and MPs I saw showed no scepticism, seeming to think AI was a magical solution to poorly performing public services and low growth.

It feels like the Simpsons’ famous “monorail” episode, where a salesman called Lyle Lanley cons the mayor of Springfield into buying a faulty monorail as a solution to all the town’s issues, leading to urban ruin. Only, instead of one Lyle Lanley doing a song-and-dance routine, there were dozens of monorail salesmen roaming across the conference.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @solhugheswriter.