Prologue Journal

Why do Hong Kong gov’t press releases sometimes read as if they were written by a computer?

• prologu5
• 09/21/202409/21/2024

Hong Kong Free Press

Malcom Gladwell is a great populariser of scientific obscurities, so we now all know that in order to achieve proficiency in almost any worthwhile pursuit you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Or alternatively, it now appears, you can outsource the grunt work to a computer and just claim the credit.

This has led to much discussion in the places on the internet where writers gather – that is real writers who produce novels, not mere scribblers like me. The question is how much help can you get from Artificial Intelligence and still regard the resulting output as your work.

Having done my 10,000 hours long ago, I have resisted the temptation to dabble in AI-aided composition. But I see there is a tricky question here. If I ask the computer to – say – write an epic poem in the style of John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel on the recent ownership of Chelsea Football Club, and the result is a resounding success, who deserves credit? Clearly the piece has not been written by Dryden. He died in 1700. But it hasn’t been written by me either.

A similar dilemma arises with blame. If you invited ChatGP to write a piece in the style of George Orwell’s Animal Farm about the recent history of Hong Kong, it is quite possible that a national security judge would consider the resulting work to be subversive. The software can’t be jailed, but the intent of its user could be questioned in court.

These are extreme cases, I suppose. What bothers the writers is the intermediate case in which the author has had some help, and the question is how much is acceptable before the participation of AI has to be acknowledged on the cover.

After all even dinosaurs like me accept some help. I tune out or switch off comments on my grammar or sentence length. But I pause for a moment after writing words with tricky spelling like accommodation, embarrassment, or Philippines, to see if the tell-tale red line appears to indicate that I have missed a double consonant somewhere.

This certainly does not call for specific acknowledgement. We all know the spell-checker jokes. Serious publishers still employ human editors. What about a detailed plot line and story structure, passed to the computer with instructions to flesh it out as a racy romantic potboiler fresh from the desk of Betty Bodiceripper?

And would it then be another new novel if you fed in the same materials but told the computer you wanted a serious exploration in the style of Albert Camus of the dilemmas of the human condition in the 21st century?

The problem for most of us (as opposed to writers) in all this is that it is becoming difficult to read anything recent without the lingering suspicion that much – or even all – of it is the product of an agile microchip.

This brings me to a particularly interesting literary form: Hong Kong government press releases condemning some outrageous comment made by a politician or newspaper overseas.

Anyone who has wrestled with our government’s efforts to provide services over the internet will happily dismiss the thought that our leaders have developed sufficient digital fluency to outsource the production of these little masterpieces to a computer.

It is, though, perhaps a problem that they so often look like the output of an AI programme urged to produce a “Hong Kong government press release rejecting foreign interference in the style of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference in Beijing”.

Anyone who reads all of these things will be unable to suppress the suspicion that the unnamed “spokesperson” responsible is getting in a bit of a rut. The language is always the same: “slander and smear,” “lies and hypocrisy,” “government will resolutely discharge its duty,” “violation of international law,” “bound to fail”.

You may wonder if we are here in the presence of a standard PR technique, writing a press release by digging out an old one and updating the names. This does not seem to be the case. On the other hand the consistency of the tone, bitter resentment and anger, is very striking. The spokesperson seems to be making a conscious effort to sound as if they are purple in the face, with steam coming out of their ears.

It may be a problem that in the old colonial days, the government spokesman wrote his rebuttals and refutations in English, and they were then translated into Chinese. Now, it appears, they are written in Chinese and then translated into English. The result comes across as rather blunt.

This may in turn be due to differences in culture and education. In cultures with alphabetic languages, like this one, words are regarded as a substitute or symbol for an elusive underlying idea. In cultures with ideograms, like Chinese, the ideograms are the idea.

The rather limited vocabulary employed in official corrections may have a more mundane explanation. Although printing with movable type was a Chinese invention, the Chinese language presents serious problems for printers because so many characters have to be available. Putting a piece together while picking from thousands of characters is hard work and writers were expected not to to make it harder by choosing from a wide range of words.

Nowadays the computer has solved this problem but English newspapers are still following conventions inherited from the old printing methods and so perhaps other people are too.

Anyway, the point which our spokesperson may consider worth pondering is that turning on the extreme indignation every time eventually becomes ineffective, and even risible. It may be too much to ask to consider the possibility that some criticisms may have merit, but could we at least try to be – shall we say – more Harris and less Trump?

One might also wonder whether every criticism needs the same response, or indeed any response at all. I realise there may be a fear that silence in the face of fierce attacks will be mistaken for indifference, or even assent, but surely there are some quarrels not worth picking?

It is very regrettable that The New York Times was not impressed by a new national security exhibition. But without a response, would anyone have noticed? The same might be said of the UK’s six-monthly report on Hong Kong. We all know what this is worth by now.

And it may have been appropriate to wait a bit before taking aim at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office Certification Act, after it passed the US House of Representatives. Despite its name this is not a law. It is what we call a Bill: a piece of proposed legislation which still has to go through a long and arduous process before it becomes law.

On average the proportion of proposed laws which make it through the US legislative process to the statute book ranges between two and nine per cent, with the lower figures coming when, as now, the two houses are controlled by different parties. Figures here.

Clearly the US legislature is not at all like ours.

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