David J Black

I listened with interest and attention, but somehow wasn’t entirely convinced. After all, the University of Edinburgh had hosted a Department of Artificial Intelligence since 1963. Headed by Donald Michie, a brilliant cryptologist who had spent much of the war codebreaking the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park, it operated out of quaint premises in the historic setting of Hope Park Square. The staff and students would often resort to the Meadow Bar after a hard days cognitising, and it was always interesting interrogating them as to what exactly they were up to.

After being satisfied that they were not engaged in any thing sinister covered by the Official Secrets Act, or that they were not simply the sad inhabitants of Geekville Central, much was clarified. AI scientists were committed to computational modelling as a methodology for explicating the interpretative processes which underlie intelligent behaviour, I was informed. There were links with older disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, but the digital computer was essential to support the many cycles of hypothesizing, modelling, simulating and testing involved in research into these interpretative processes.

Tragically, Donald Michie was to die in a car crash in 1983, and in 1998 this interesting division of the knowledge industry would be absorbed into something called the School of Informatics, which today occupies a truly horrible building just north of George Square.

I more or less forgot about AI until my son brought ChatGPT to my attention, explaining that if one asked it a question it could always come up with an answer, a bit like Alexa in a good mood.

Challenge accepted. Poetry lovers among us will recall that when a laudanum infused Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat down to write Kublai Khan he was interrupted by a knock at the door. The person from Porlock had just ended his reverie. We asked ChatGPT to finish his poem. The result was a load of incomprehensible gibberish. So far, so bad.

With scepticism in mind, I thought I might seek out any deficiencies and hallucinations with the current applications of AI, and found a bit of a cracker. A fellow sceptic, Andy Arthur, shared my doubts about an alleged visit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made to a pub opposite the Commonwealth Pool, and began poking about in the facts, rather than the fantasies.

Unfortunately, the fantasies had stolen a march on the facts in the form of several invented tales in the local press which owed nothing to a passing acquaintance with the truth. Conan Doyle, it was averred, had called into a pub established in 1970 for a pint. Among the gullible outlets peddling this farrago as truth was Scotland’s supposed national paper of record, The Scotsman, which swallowed the lie hook, line and sinker.

The trouble with AI is its tendency to scrape everything and anything about a subject, even where the ‘facts’ turn out to be unadulterated falsehoods. Indeed, Doyle almost certainly knew the building in question, but never as a pub. It had belonged to a relative of his fellow student, William Burn-Murduch, a well known explorer, artist, and bagpiper responsible for, among other things, introducing a polar bear cub, Starboard, to Edinburgh Zoo.

William had occupied the magnificent mansion of Arthur Lodge, where he entertained such fellow explorers as Amundsen and Scott. First built for publisher William Blackwood in 1806, from 1901 the adjoining villa at 2 Salisbury Road became the home of Jane Usher of the wealthy distilling family, and her recently acquired husband, the same William. Thus was the Burn-Murdoch link forged in the 1806 villa next door to palatial Arthur Lodge.

The two men were to remain close friends. Given Conan Doyle’s abiding interest in psychical research which dated from 1893, he persuaded Burn Murdoch to attend a séance in Toronto in 1895 with the objective of solving a murder. The killer was eventually discovered, but with no meaningful intervention from the spirit world, it would appear. 

The later AI excursion into hallucinatory excess had clearly been scraped from various dodgy sources and recast as a true account of events which had the author of Sherlock Holmes visiting the place for a pint. AI, like The Scotsman, perpetuated and repeated the lie, inscribing it as a fact of history, so that in a weird Orwellian way it somehow became ‘true’.

Only it couldn’t possibly have been true. When Sir Arthur had been felled by a heart attack in 1930, predeceasing his friend William by nine years, 2 Salisbury Road had still been a private home, though William’s widow Jane had died in 1927. Other than the intrusion of an artist’s studio window at 1st floor level it was little changed. No record can be traced of who next bought it but by the 1940s it seemed to have served as a boarding annexe for St Trinnean’s progressive girls school which in 1925 had occupied the nearby baronial mansion of St Leonard’s Hall, former home of the publisher Thomas Nelson. The school, famously lampooned by author Ronald Searle in the 1960 film The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s, closed shortly after the war.

In 1972 the building was bought by the Salisbury Centre, which specialised in Eastern-inspired alternative philosophies and meditation under Dr Winifred Rushford, and barely two decades later, the Usher link was re-established when that particular company applied for an alcohol licence for a pub which would be initially known as The Gold Medal in recognition of the 1970 Commonwealth Games, then being held in Edinburgh for the first time. It was briefly The Firkin, until finally it became The Salisbury Arms. Despite his abiding interest in psychical research and a penchant, presumably, for disembodied astral travel, there is no record of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had ceased to exist 40 years earlier, coming anywhere near the place, dead or alive.

But one should never allow the facts to get in the way of a good story, especially when promoting a pub. Fallacy masquerading as fact somehow became the authorised version, and AI was duly taken in. The greater preponderance of myth in the case of Conan Doyle’s alleged visit to a 1970s pub tipped the balance, and Artificial Intelligence was duly duped.

What other fantasies, one wonders, are being peddled like this? Perhaps Sherlock Holmes could be asked to investigate.