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- [00:04]
A
The economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. Today on the show Death from above in India and what's behind it and how it's getting harder to spot AI writing. But first, Calm is returning to Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave across the Strait of Gibraltar. That calm was hard to imagine last week when tens of thousands of migrants streamed in from Morocco. Spanish border police were fully overwhelmed as people swam or even walked around a breakwater that serves as a flimsy border. Scores of migrants died in the attempt. Those who survived found themselves disappointed. There's no food here, one migrant says. We're all leaving. And an overwhelming majority of them did. But not all. This sudden surge has a long and complicated backstory. A big part of it is historical enmity between Morocco and Algeria in particular, who has the rightful claim to another North African territory, Western Sahara. But more than the history, what's under scrutiny now are the present immigration policies and attitudes of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, one of the last left leaning leaders on the continent.
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I think it raises many questions, especially for Spain, of course, but also for the European Union as a whole.
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Michael Reed is a Spain correspondent and writer at large for the Economist and is based in Madrid.
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B
The Spanish government is being asked by the opposition, how did this happen? How was this allowed to happen? Was the government not forewarned? I think the answer there is the government was distracted by these very, very serious wildfires we've had over the past month and it was preparing to go on holiday in most of the rest of Europe. They look at this situation and think that Spain's immigration policies have contributed to a kind of pull factor which was involved in this. They say the Spanish government denies that.
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A
So let's wind back a little bit. Why did this happen now? Why so many people suddenly trying to get into Ceuta?
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B
The immediate trigger was a ruling by the Spanish Supreme Court three weeks or so ago that people who arrived in Ceuto without breaching the border fortifications could not be sent back immediately. And the interpretation of that was that if you arrived by swimming where there were no border defences, then you could not be sent back. That got around on social media in Morocco, particularly on TikTok. In the end, thousands of people moved to the north of Morocco. They began crossing at the beginning of last week and then there was a flood on Thursday the 30th. The big question is what was the role of the Moroccan authorities? That leaves a big question for Spain as to whether Morocco is a reliable partner or not. The Spanish government diplomatically and has been blaming trafficking rings for this. But this was just masses of people moving to the border.
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A
There is precedent here, though. People have flooded or at least trickled into ceuto before.
- [03:57]
B
In 2021, a large number arrived in Ceuta, perhaps 8,000, perhaps more, because Morocco took a decision to tell its border guards to step aside. And Morocco organized that incursion, and they did it because they. There's a big rivalry here between Morocco and Algeria. In the background, Spain had allowed the leader of the Polisario, that is a military organization of the people of the Western Sahara, which is a former Spanish colony which was occupied by Morocco in 1975. And the Polisario represents, with Algerian backing, those people who are opposed to Moroccan occupation of the Sahara. And so Spain allowed the military leader of the Polisario Front to come into Spain for medical treatment, and they didn't tell Morocco. And that infuriated the Moroccans, and their response was to weaponize migration. In this way, Morocco and Algeria are enemies. And any switch towards Algeria annoys Morocco, and Morocco feels empowered by the fact that it is a key ally of Donald Trump in North Africa and it's an ally of Israel. Some months later, Pedro Sanchez, Spain's prime minister, changed the country's position on the Western Sahara, which had been in line with the official UN position that there should be a referendum to determine the sovereignty of of the Sahara. But he switched that to backing Morocco's plan for autonomy for the Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty. That caused annoyance in Algeria and it caused annoyance in Spain. But if the aim was to placate Morocco permanently, when it appears not to have worked.
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A
And so how much of that political background from 2021 do you think has informed what's happened more recently?
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B
I think it almost certainly has. The political trigger for what has just happened may well have been the fact that Pedro Sanchez visited Algeria early last month and restored the friendship between the two countries to what it was before the switch in the Spanish position. And given the enmity between Morocco and Algeria, I'm sure that was a factor in what has happened and what's been
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the wider reaction to that flood of people into EU territory.
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22 EU governments signed a letter calling for an emergency meeting of interior ministers, which will take place on Tuesday. It's a letter in which they express their rejection at what has happened. They do express some solidarity with Spain, but they also express, between the lines, annoyance with Spain. And in particular, they say that illegal entries cannot be turned into permanent legal entry. That is a reference to an amnesty which Pedro Sanchez's government earlier this year decided to give to migrants who were in the country without papers. The government said that would involve about 500,000 people. They've received 1.2 million requests for legalization. And that, remember, is more or less the same number of people who entered the Schengen area of the EU in 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis. And many governments in the EU now are much tougher about immigration than they used to be. So these governments were very annoyed at the amnesty and the fact that Spain, as far as we know, did not consult them at all.
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A
So there is this longer running political backdrop and a seemingly soft on immigration stance from Mr. Sanchez. And I guess people coming into Ceuta simply saw that the gates were ajar. How has the Spanish government responded to all of this?
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Well, on the one hand, it denounced this as an attack on Spanish territorial integrity and has sent some police reinforcements to Ceuta. And it has worked with Morocco to send the vast majority of those who crossed over back. But its other reaction has been to complain about what it sees as the lack of European solidarity. It is particularly incensed by calls by Italy's Prime Minister, Giorgio Meloni, that Spain should be suspended from the Schengen area of document free travel. The Spanish government says what happened in Celta has nothing to do with the immigrant amnesty. And that is true as far as it goes. People who get to Celta cannot move on automatically into the rest of the eu. They're subject to document checks before they can get to the mainland. The point that the other European governments make is that Spain has come to be seen as a soft touch. Quite. And people who get into Spain are in the Schengen area. Behind this is politics, obviously. And Pedro Sanchez is one of the last remaining left of centre leaders in European government. He has made a point out of Spain's more welcoming attitude to immigration. European governments feel that he is pushing a position which is not a collective one.
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A
So this situation then in Ceuta seems like the start of a wider battle rather than a thing unto itself.
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This episode would appear to show that Morocco can weaponize migration whenever it wants to. And that is a problem for Spain. I think it's also a problem for Europe. And whether it's in Morocco's interest to do that is another question, because it may produce pushback from the EU in terms of aid and trade concessions that it gives to Morocco. The bigger question here is that some people see in all this the hand of Donald Trump, or at least his allies and advisors in the United States and of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, who do not like the positions that the Spanish government has taken. I think we will see in the end, as a result of this, more pressure on Spain to tighten up its immigration policy, which would actually be in line with public opinion in Spain, which now feels, having been extremely welcoming for many years to immigrants, polls show that the majority of Spaniards think there are now too many. This is a very complicated episode with geopolitical dimensions, humanitarian dimensions and political dimensions.
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Thanks very much for your time, Michael.
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B
It's a pleasure, Jason, talking to you. As always,
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Whenever I leave the house in India, I am constantly worried something is going to fall in my head.
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Leo Morani writes Ashoka, our newish column about India.
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That is because the list of things that can fall on your head and kill you is a very, very, very long list. Here are a few examples that have culled fraud in newspaper reports over the past several months. Billboards, tanker trucks, trash mountains, hundreds and hundreds of trees, thousands and thousands of branches, airport terminal canopies, various bits of buildings, and I do mean various bits, tiles, balconies, entire buildings, etc. Molten metal, an actual anvil before this list goes on.
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This is genuinely lethal stuff you're talking about.
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C
Yeah, Jason. I mean, a couple of years ago I was walking down the street and a balcony collapsed 30 minutes after I passed under it. I had a narrow escape. But last year, seven children in a school in Rajasthan did not. When the roof collapsed in them. The next day, two more school roofs collapsed. Another two same state last few weeks. In April, a student died when he was playing basketball and the post toppled onto him. This was the third such incident in six months. The billboard I mentioned, that was in 2024. It was three times the maximum permitted size. It weighed 250 tons. It collapsed on a petrol station, killed 17 people. The molten metal I mentioned, nine workers were killed at a steel plant. Last month, it was at 1600 degrees centigrade. And what we're talking about here is pretty alarming and terrifying stuff.
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A
So it's an enormous and it's a troubling list. Leo, what is going on here?
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C
Well, there's several things going on. So the first, especially the trees and the branches, to say nothing of the individual coconuts and jackfruit, has a lot to do with the weather. So in Mumbai, for example, it's been very wet and as a result some trees have fallen over with very high winds and timot rain. It's also a surprisingly green city, so we accept that. And there's a second thing, which is a lot of infrastructure, buildings. A lot of stuff in India is quite aging and decrepit and hasn't been maintained or hasn't been upgraded. So some of the items in the list come from that category. You know, old schools that haven't been upgraded. I mean, this is a scandal. I think they should have been. Children should not be in unsafe buildings. But that is a factual answer to your question. The third, I think, is the most troubling, which is India is in the middle of a massive infrastructure and construction boom. And this should in many ways ameliorate the previous problem. But because of very weak enforcement of health and safety laws, of transport safety laws and so on and so forth, that's where you're getting things like iron rods, iron pipes, iron plates, a piling rig, a crane, trolley, bits of bridges, all this stuff falling over. And that comes from the fact that we're doing all this stuff, but we're not doing it as well as we could.
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A
So the issue here, as you hinted at there, is simply a failure of, or a failure to enforce health and safety regulations that would save lives.
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C
That's one big part of it. I mean, these regulations do exist. There's tons of regulations in India. There's health and safety regulations, road transport safety regulations, all sorts of things. Right. Very few of these are enforced, and when they're enforced, it's quite ad hoc. So it's generally cheaper to pay small fines once in a while maybe, than to actually take these rules seriously. So that's one thing that needs fixing. There's also a certain amount of negligence. I mean, I've given you a lot of examples that are varying in character. So it's hard to say, you know, this applies to everything. And the third reason, of course, Jason, is corruption that contributes. The fact that some of these infrastructure projects are subpar or are falling apart even before they're complete. It has to do with corruption. And then underlying all of this is the fact that the value of human life in India is not taken as seriously as it should be.
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A
You think that some of this is that the sanctity of life is held in lower regard in India than elsewhere.
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I think that if these sort of incidents happened in a Western country with a proportional number of deaths per population, I think there would be a massive hue and cry. I think there would be accountability and I think there would be changes. I don't have a number for how many people are killed on an annual basis by falling objects in India, because that number does not exist. But it's a large number, I can tell you that based on the examples I've gathered over the years. And I think if even one of these horrific things was to happen in London, it would be a much, much bigger deal than it is here in Bombay.
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A
I mean, that might be a high level fact about modern India, but each of these individual lives are valued at home, right? There must be massive outcry each time this avoidable stuff happens.
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There is massive outcry for the worst stuff, certainly. And the response then is unsatisfactory. Usually it will involve suspending, not even firing some officials. There is some scapegoat like a welder who was last working on a bit of a flower that fell over. And then they offer something called ex gratia compensation to the people who've been affected, and then everybody moves on. But I do sense, Jason, that the frequency of these events, because it is accelerating, I do sense that there's a growing sentiment within the Indian media and policymakers that this is something that needs fixing. In recent weeks, I have read several op EDS and pieces about this stuff happening and how it needs fixing, coming at it from different angles. And I think this is something that in the coming years, if not months, will finally start being taken seriously.
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A
But in the meantime, every time you leave the house, you are looking up to see if there's, I don't know, a piano coming at you.
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C
Um, no, I can't even do that because then I might fall into an open drain or a manhole or the ground beneath me might simply crumble away. There's no good option here. You might say, leo, you could sit at home. What if my building falls down? That happens with frequency as well. So I suppose the only real thing you can do at this point is marvel at the sheer absurdity of it all and cross your fingers and hope for the best.
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A
Leo, thanks very much for joining us.
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C
Thank you for having me on, Jason.
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D
A ghostwriter is haunting the English language.
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Caitlin Talbot is a digital culture correspondent for the Economist.
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It's frightfully versatile. It can mimic Shakespeare's sonnets or a schlocky beach read. And it's frightfully fast, churning out thousands of words a minute. Wordsmiths are understandably spooked. This is not a real ghost, of course, but AI and it's everywhere. It used to be easier to see it. Just think of all those EM dashes and mentions of deep dives and. And delving into rich tapestries. But it's getting better at staying out of sight.
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Go on. How is it better at hiding its spooky ways?
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So the short answer is that AI is improving with every update. That's because it's trained on human data and trained by humans. And so it picks up things that people find impressive and drops things that they don't. There are some quite good detection tools, including Pangram and various other algorithms, but they can offer false positives and little explanation as to why something is AI. So we thought of another option to discover AI's hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine.
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A
Ooh, interesting. A deep data dive. Go on. How do you go about doing such a thing?
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D
So we obviously need to work with Sandre, one of our excellent data journalists. He compared writing that we know is human so that of the Economist itself with every major chatbot. So Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok. And how we did this was, for a while we had these AI summaries on our articles. So we thought we would ask AI to use the summary that it had already generated for our articles to write a version of that article. And that gave us a huge corpus of AI generated text and human text, that being us, which we could then compare across more than a million words. And the Economist has its own unique writing style. And to make sure that we were detecting AI's quirks rather than our own, we then checked this corpus against journalism from cnn, the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as excerpts from best selling novels published between 1950 and 2022.
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A
Okay, so the data sets are clear. What did you find?
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So we split the project down into three sections, starting with words. So AI uses lots of polysyllabic words. Words like significant, increasingly, consequences, and then also rare words. So interdependence, re industrialization, scientific lingo, talking about parameter methodology, not necessarily in science, scientific articles always. And then moving on to punctuation. We found that for a long time AI was considered to use EM dashes lots and lots and lots.
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And making it hard for those of us in the world, by the way, who actually like and use carefully EM dashes. I've been afraid to. But anyway, carry on.
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D
I know the real reason for this project is to liberate the EM dash, you know, but we found basically that ChatGPT really doesn't do that anymore. It uses them far less than we do now, so.
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So we can have them back.
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D
Yeah, start using them again. In fact, AI doesn't really use much punctuation at all. It really doesn't use many commas, semicolons, and it really hates parentheses. It almost never puts anything in parentheses. And unsurprisingly, the most overused word, therefore is and because everything is just stuck together in these long, rambling sentences. One other thing we found is that there's less varied punctuation. So you might find that in an article that AI has written, it's only full stops. And then the third thing was we looked at the sentence level that allowed us to see how passages are built. So these long sentences with lots of ands and then also, when they do sort of want to liven things up, AI will often turn to a well worn rhetorical structure like it's not X but Y, it's not only but also, or rules of three. And that's grouping things together within a sentence in threes. So the Economist also quite likes the rule of three. And we often group together pieces of advice in threes. The AI will offer sentences like, the mystery has been solved, not partially, not ambiguously, but definitively. That's the kind of rule of three that we're seeing. Pretty redundant. Don't know why you would have thought that the mystery had been solved ambiguously because it's been solved.
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A
I guess I'd ask what you learned from this exercise. The AI is getting better, as you say all the time. As models improve, they're going to learn not to have all of these AI tells and so on. We where does the sort of hazy middle ground between human writing and AI writing go from here, do you think? And how should aspiring writers, or, you know, writers that get paid to write deal with it?
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D
Yeah, well, I think that in doing this study, we notice that AI, for as much as it wants to impress us or write well, it falls into some of the traps of bad human writing. Therefore, I think it's never been more important that you aren't sloppy. I think it's never been more important to be creative in what you're writing and to make yourself distinctive from AI by being creative. I'd say that the other thing that we learned, and we argue this in our leader pages, is that sloppy AI writing being everywhere really puts a premium on editing skills. So learning to be a good editor has never been more important. And we offer various pieces of advice for this, from knowing your audience to having a really close eye for detail and thinking about what every single word on the page means. Because what AI will often do is it might give you something that sounds quite good on first reading that actually makes no sense. So I think it's about being attuned to those and exactly how language is functioning for your intended meaning has never been more important.
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A
Caitlin, thanks very much for joining us.
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D
Thank you. Jason,
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free the up dash. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.