The Critical Commentator

  Social media platforms such as TikTok are hosting AI-generated deepfake videos of doctors whose words have been manipulated to help sell supplements and spread health misinformation. The factchecking organisation Full Fact has uncovered hundreds of such videos featuring impersonated versions of doctors and influencers directing viewers to a US-based supplements firm. The Charlatan Franz van Mieris the elder (1635-1681) Photo Credit:  City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC]  All the deepfakes involve real footage of a healthcare expert taken from the internet. However, the pictures have been reworked using AI so that the speakers are encouraging women going through menopause to buy products such as probiotics and Himalayan shilajit... "This is certainly a sinister and worrying new tactic," said Leo Benedictus, the Full Fact factchecker who undertook its investigation, which it published yesterday. Prof David Taylor-Robinson, an expert in health inequalities at Liverpool Un...

  Prof Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub is a retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery who established the heart transplantation centre at Harefield hospital. He performed the first combined heart and lung transplant in the UK, and set up the Chain of Hope charity, which helps to provide heart operations for children. He was born in Egypt in 1935 but moved to the UK in 1961. Portrait of a Doctor Francis Picabia (1879-1953) Photo Credit:: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] "I'm totally committed to the NHS because I practised in other countries, including the US, and I am totally convinced that it is the best system. Why? Because it maintains the sacred relationship between the patient and the doctor. Obviously there are problems, and issues with funding, but  it remains the best system in the world. Ask a British person if they want to have the very best treatment  for themselves and their family, they will say yes. And then you ask them if they want to have the same for their neighbour, it's st...

 L ike triple-distilled whiskey, Irish pubs appear to have timeless appeal. They are staple settings in films, books and plays, draw tourists to Ireland, replicate themselves around the world and induce social media quests for the perfect snug and the perfect pint... Irish pubs are in trouble. They are vanishing from rural Ireland and many are struggling to survive in the capital... Since 2005, Ireland has lost a quarter of its pubs, more than 2,100, averaging 112 closures a year. Reasons cited include high taxes on alcohol, drink-driving laws, rising property prices and a fall in alcohol consumption... Boors Carousing Dutch School Photo Credit York Art Gallery [Public Domain]  Just over half of the population live within 300 metres of Ireland's 7,000 pubs and Share [Perry Share, a co-editor of The Irish Pub] said, pubs remained central to expressions of Irish culture. "Even if declining, the pub is still part of the fabric of everyday life," he added. "If it does di...

  When Tom Stoppard visited the refugee camp in Calais once known as the jungle , where thousands waited to cross the Channel , he was asked by a journalist whether it was possible that Britain's goodwill was being exploited by would-be immigrants and asylum seekers. Tom replied that such a thing might indeed be a possibility but that, even if it were, this was an argument about which he was happy to be historically on the wrong side. This reply has always seemed to me the most resonant remark made by any public figure in the last 20 years. It is hard to think of anyone else who would approach the question of illegal immigration with such concision and characteristic generosity. The Pipe of Freedom Thomas Stuart Smith (1813/14-1869) Photo Credit:The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum [ CC BY-NC-ND ] As an immigrant himself from Czechoslovakia , Tom did more than any other playwright or novelist in his own lifetime to redefine Brtishness as something freedom-loving and open-...

 All political systems are vulnerable to corruption. The most stable way of selecting a ruler, Gibbon [Edward Gibbon, historian] suggests, is probably hereditary monarchy. Few modern readers share this periwigged 18th-century elitist's distaste for democratic government. But to those of us who cherish democracy, the perspective of an outsider for whom our system was merely one absurd aberration among many is a useful challenge. Pattern for Democracy Emma Biggs (b. 1956) Photo Credit:  Anthony Mcintosh/Art UK The crisis of the democratic West (for which the latest depressing evidence is an Ipsos poll suggesting nearly half of western voters believe democracy is broken) has been endlessly puzzled over. Readers will be familiar with the leading theories: distrust of elites, wealth inequality, immigration, polarisation. Doubtless there is truth in all those ideas. Less palatable is the thought that all political systems eventually decay. Why should democracy be an exception?... Mo...

  This week everyone appears to be deeply concerned for the wellbeing of 28-year-old YouTube celebrity Jake Paul . The announcement of his fight against Anthony Joshua next month has generated a flood of foreboding prognoses, and fair enough. Stepping into the ring with a two-time world heavyweight champion when a) you're not even a heavyweight, b) your record consists almost entirely of novices and geriatrics and c) you still fight like a marmoset trapped in an empty crisp packet... Obviously Jake Paul will eventually lose, and there may even be some cartoon blood spat in the process. But at the end they're going to hug and Joshua is going to call Paul a warrior, a true fighter, and the pair will hoist their arms skywards, and Jake Paul will live to grift another day... And what we essentially have here is the ultimate collision of these two worlds, these two kinds of fame and power, the pure athlete and the performance artist, the puncher and the prankster, meeting on weird...