AI is a backward-looking technology that reinforces old biases, warns Natalie Bennett, while fuelling energy-hungry AI data centres will leave the green transition in tatters, writes Christopher Tanner. Plus letters by Philip Ward, Kevin Donovan and Giles du Boulay

There are at least three major concerns to raise with the government’s apparent betting the future of the UK on so-called artificial intelligence (‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI, 12 January).

First, as Prof Shannon Vallor at the University of Edinburgh has pointed out in her book The AI Mirror, generative AI is not creative; it only looks backward. It can only remix and reproduce what we have done before, the same errors, failures and biases that have got us into our current mess.