Forbidden Planet Fruit News Posted by Ian Symes on 14th August 2026, 09:10 Surprise! The Red Dwarf Titan YouTube channel isn’t quite finished yet. There’s another video premiering at the traditional time of Friday 11am, entitled Waiting For Titan // Launch Day, London. For the first time, I know what to expect from this one in advance, having been present while it was being filmed last month at the launch day event at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Avenue. In fact, there’s a non-zero chance that my large, balding face will appear in this video, as I was vox-popped by roving reporter Rich Lawden. But don’t worry, there were far more interesting people present too, so hopefully we’ll be hearing from them as well.
Talking of FP, not sure if this was ever picked up in the G&T news roundup but they did a nice long interview with Andrew:
Well that was just lovely. It goes to show how good you were at summarising the whole situation around this book (and authentically praising it), that you ended up being in the video for longer than the author. And you’d actually heard part of the audiobook while Andrew hadn’t!
Ian Symes: “Causal Viewer”… the least accurate caption of all time! Love this whole thing. Really great stuff.
Ian Symes: “Causal Viewer”… the least accurate caption of all time! “Casual Viewer” was clearly an intentional piss-take, but “Causal Viewer” would have actually been apropos.
Ian Symes: “Causal Viewer”… the least accurate caption of all time! “Casual Viewer” was clearly an intentional piss-take, but “Causal Viewer” would have actually been apropos. I was aware of the joke but yes! Forgive my dyslexia. Nice that it actually created something accurate for once.
Do we know who the artist is on the concept work? Also, is it legit? As in free from generative Ai? Yeah, agreed. The lack of proper credit is troubling. Either it’s because it’s AI, or it’s the hard work of an artist/s who aren’t being credited.
Very nicely put together. Anybody else notice the titles of the last three in the pan along all those Red Dwarf-related books?
Excellent video, and all nicely summarised Ian. I’ve done these kinds of talking heads things before and it’s not always easy to make it look natural like this.
Excellent video, and all nicely summarised Ian. I’ve done these kinds of talking heads things before and it’s not always easy to make it look natural like this. Yeah, well done Ian. These things are way more demanding that people realise and you did great.
A couple of things regarding the concept art. For one, it is entirely not unusual for artists to go uncredited with this kind of thing so that in itself is not necessarily a red flag, although I don’t know if that channel usually credits artists or not. At the very least, a human has been involved at some point because there is background text that is legible and not just jumbled nonsense so it may be that an artist painted over AI generated images. There a few small tells, to me, that look like AI might have been involved at some point. I’ve also put this image through three “is it AI?” detectors and they all say strong chance that AI was used, between 71-99% between them. If there was a named artist attached to this and they claimed not to use AI then I would believe them. As things are, I think AI was possibly used as the basis for the paintings.
It really doesn’t look like AI to me. Sorry Cappsy, there is a bit peppered throughout. Director here for those who haven’t had the extremely good fortune to meet me previously. I make no bones about making use of BHI tools currently available. I’m not particularly precious about it. I think they’re extraordinary utilities, and I think it’s responsible to explore their potential and work out how best to use them. I remember similar concerns when (now commonplace) graphics packages first started becoming available, and I am also reminded of when Tron was disallowed an Academy nomination back in the day simply for using computers at all. People are rightly entitled to their views and arguments both for and against. Again, I am tremendously excited by the technology which I think is here to stay. I’d much rather have the discussion in the appropriate places and work out how we can get the best from it. And, if it makes any difference, there’s actually zero money in this project whatsoever. It’s a labour of love, and a promise I made to Rob to do my utmost to celebrate what turned out to be his final work. Happy to be transparent about the tools used. I was actually expecting the upload to be flagged or the option to add a tag but nothing came up. Again, happy to add something if I can figure it out.
Happy to be transparent about the tools used. I was actually expecting the upload to be flagged or the option to add a tag but nothing came up. Again, happy to add something if I can figure it out. Don’t you have this option when editing the YouTube video details? Just below the age restriction and paid promotion declarations: But I suppose that its use here doesn’t fit any of those categories.
I’d much rather have the discussion in the appropriate places and work out how we can get the best from it. I’d say probably not using it if it’s trained on other people’s work and uses abhorrent amounts of resources to create a picture when said picture can be created by an actual human being using far, far fewer resources is probably the way we can get the best from it.
The amount of power used up by AI is equivalent to like 0.0001% of the overall frivolous use of the internet. In other words, it is energy that would be used up anyway as the internet grows and expands. I work in an international security company, and the strengths and weaknesses of AI were hammered into us during training. It cannot be relied on as an information source, but as a collector of sources, it’s highly efficient. As for its use in art: I see art is the expression of oneself. We’ve all seen that banana taped to the wall. We’ve all seen a Jackson Pollock. Ultimately, only the artist can say what shape the expression of his or her soul takes. So when I come across generative AI art, all I see is the honest expression of their tiny, shriveled soul. The point I’m reaching is that AI is a tool like any other. It can be used intelligently or foolishly, but pointless demonizing of the tool’s existence is childish when its objective value and abilities have already been determined by far more intelligent people than anyone here, including myself.
The amount of power used up by AI is equivalent to like 0.0001% of the overall frivolous use of the internet The solution is clear – Rushy isn’t allowed to use the internet any more.
The amount of power used up by AI is equivalent to like 0.0001% of the overall frivolous use of the internet. In other words, it is energy that would be used up anyway as the internet grows and expands. I work in an international security company, and the strengths and weaknesses of AI were hammered into us during training. It cannot be relied on as an information source, but as a collector of sources, it’s highly efficient. As for its use in art: I see art is the expression of oneself. We’ve all seen that banana taped to the wall. We’ve all seen a Jackson Pollock. Ultimately, only the artist can say what shape the expression of his or her soul takes. So when I come across generative AI art, all I see is the honest expression of their tiny, shriveled soul. The point I’m reaching is that AI is a tool like any other. It can be used intelligently or foolishly, but pointless demonizing of the tool’s existence is childish when its objective value and abilities have already been determined by far more intelligent people than anyone here, including myself. This IEA report from last year shows that data centres accounted for 1.5% of all the world’s electricity usage in 2025. That’s everything digital – AI, the internet, the lot of it. And of that 1.5%, AI consumed around 33.3% (0.5% of total consumption). IEA’s own projections show that AI will be consuming 50% of all data centre electricity usage by 2030. So, I’m not sure where you got that 0.0001% from but it’s wildly inaccurate. — When it comes to AI art, it’s difficult for me as someone whose profession is literally being destroyed by that very thing but I see it as here to stay and one of those things that will just have to be adjusted to. I don’t find AI art *at all* interesting but I have no ethical issues so long as they’re trained on libraries that they have permission to use… which is of course not the case for the vast majority.
And the internet uses around 3%, plus AI is even constantly being refined to run on less and less energy, as per the same website you just showed me. It’s a complete non-issue for us ninnies on a forum about British sitcoms. No one here is qualified to make grand statements about the pros and cons of AI. It’s a tool. Leave the logistics to actual professionals.
Side note, if anyone wants a glimpse of what the future of AI holds then I’d recommend the book ‘The Coming Wave’ by CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman. It is mildly terrifying, particularly the bit about how all of our online encryption (for banking etc) will become obsolete the second AI-based malware meets the first quantum computer…
And the internet uses around 3% 3% of what? That 1.5% referenced ALL data centre usage – including the internet – and AI uses roughly 33.3% of that. That overall usage is forecast to grow to 3% by 2030 but then AI accounts for 50% of that. It’s a complete non-issue for us ninnies on a forum about British sitcoms. You saw the part where I said it was destroying my profession, yes? Leave the logistics to actual professionals. Shame you didn’t think of that an hour ago as opposed to just when the bogus stats you pulled out of your arse are challenged.
I think you might be referencing the 3-5% figure that’s often quoted when you include powering the devices that we use to *access* the internet, which is fair enough, but given they’re also used to access AI…. And I probably got a bit too snappy there (after consciously avoiding that in my first reply) so apologies.
It really doesn’t look like AI to me. Sorry Cappsy, there is a bit peppered throughout. Director here for those who haven’t had the extremely good fortune to meet me previously. I make no bones about making use of BHI tools currently available. I’m not particularly precious about it. I think they’re extraordinary utilities, and I think it’s responsible to explore their potential and work out how best to use them. I remember similar concerns when (now commonplace) graphics packages first started becoming available, and I am also reminded of when Tron was disallowed an Academy nomination back in the day simply for using computers at all. People are rightly entitled to their views and arguments both for and against. Again, I am tremendously excited by the technology which I think is here to stay. I’d much rather have the discussion in the appropriate places and work out how we can get the best from it. And, if it makes any difference, there’s actually zero money in this project whatsoever. It’s a labour of love, and a promise I made to Rob to do my utmost to celebrate what turned out to be his final work. Happy to be transparent about the tools used. I was actually expecting the upload to be flagged or the option to add a tag but nothing came up. Again, happy to add something if I can figure it out. Not entirely clear on whether the AI tools were used to generate the images from scratch using prompts, or just to help polish and tidy up a human-generated piece of art, as you would use something like Photoshop, etc. If it’s the latter, I guess I can live with it. If it’s the former (which was my suspicion on first viewing of the vid) then much less so. :(
Firstly – that was a really nice video to watch. Lovely to hear more from Andrew, Paul, Ed and Red Dwarf’s sole remaining fan. Highlight for me was the bit where Ian announced his new political party which stands to ban all forms of preparation: Lastly, very disappointing to hear about the use of AI for the concept art. Appreciate this video was put together for free as a labour of love, but at the very least I would have hoped for captions to indicate that the content being shown was AI generated. If Rob and Andrew had commissioned some concept art during any of their work on Titan across it’s various forms then that would have been cool to see, but in the absence of that I think I’d have vastly preferred to see nothing at all. Even if it meant looking at Ian Symes for even longer! AI in this form is a dangerous tool for many reasons – not least the threat to the livelihood of actual creatives. And that’s before considering the power consumption, ecological impact, privacy concerns, illegal harvesting of training material… yeah, lets try to avoid unnecessary boosting of a monster shall we?
For a bit of levity, can I just say that comment about Ian’s new political party REALLY made me laugh.
I agree with the comments praising Ian for his contributions. I’ve sometimes had to speak in situations a little similar to this, and it’s not always easy to give coherent answers without hesitating or repeating yourself. Especially when you have people walking by or extraneous noise.
And I probably got a bit too snappy there (after consciously avoiding that in my first reply) so apologies. That’s alright, you were better informed than me and there’s nothing more frustrating than talking to someone less informed who’s convinced he’s more informed.
Has anyone made a generative art tool that was trained entirely on public domain (preferably CC0) data? I’d be mildly interested to see the output just out of sheer curiosity. As a hobbyist free culture creator I can’t use AI because it might render it a derivative of a copyrighted work (at least until there is clearer case law), which would violate the GPL or Creative Commons licenses I use, even for tuning up an existing image.
Has anyone made a generative art tool that was trained entirely on public domain (preferably CC0) data? I’d be mildly interested to see the output just out of sheer curiosity. As a hobbyist free culture creator I can’t use AI because it might render it a derivative of a copyrighted work (at least until there is clearer case law), which would violate the GPL or Creative Commons licenses I use, even for tuning up an existing image. I don’t know about that, but some stock image websites like iStock have generative AI that is trained entirely on their own libraries so that the results are copyright-safe and they say any contributor whose work gets used in a generated image gets a little kickback. This model is, in my opinion, the closest thing to an “ethical” generative AI that exists currently. I haven’t tried it for a couple of years, but back when I did it was way below the level of stuff like Midjourney, presumably because the scope of what it has been trained on is so much smaller which, ultimately, is why this will never be the default model.
Some of the doomsaying about AI is a bit peculiar to me, because if it’s supposed to be so good, why is it still so shit? Will it really be the end of encryption as we know it or are you just trying to sell a book? We’ve been a couple of years away from it suddenly being good for more than a couple of years. I think it’s shite for the most part. The Google AI summary it spits at you can be quite useful if you have your head switched on and don’t just take everything it says verbatim and at face value. But it should be an opt-in thing, and it has pretty much killed websites. Even if those “websites” is just Reddit threads I’d be clicking on otherwise. It won’t replace human creativity, because it’s too shite. It won’t take over the world, because it’s too shite. AI still looks like AI, you can sniff it out a mile off, and anything that fools doesn’t fool for very long. Anything else sounds to me like people buying into investor bro AI-company-CEO talk.
My feelings on AI are mixed and have evolved in the past couple of years since I started using it regularly at work. It can be an amazingly efficient time-saving tool for research purposes, and can do certain things that no human could do in the same amount of time. However, it still requires common-sense human oversight and still needs to have quite specific guardrails put in place to stop it going wildly off-piste. And I still prefer not to use any generative AI functions whatsoever, because while that stuff has improved, it’s still not as good as an expert human doing the same thing, so I still prefer to do any “generative” work myself.
It won’t replace human creativity, because it’s too shite. That doesn’t mean it won’t replace *artists* though, which it already has to a large degree. I can personally testify as to how much the pool of available work has shrunk in recent years because so many companies are using generative AI instead. I totally understand the appeal – instead of paying hundreds for an artist to spend a week drawing their idea up, they can spend little to nothing to get it back fully-realised in seconds. Netflix revealed recently they’ve used AI in 300 of its programmes this year alone, replacing various creative roles along the way. Marvel Studios laid off almost their entire (award winning) visual development team back in April. It’s not doomsaying, it’s already happening.
it should be an opt-in thing You can take a minute to edit your Chrome settings so it redirects your searches to the plain Web tab so you also don’t get other intrusive stuff, if that still works. I don’t use Google unless I really have to anyway, knobheads.
It won’t replace human creativity, because it’s too shite. I agree it’s mostly shite but far too many people will happily accept shite if it’s cheaper and demands little from them.
I’ve found it really useful to help me figure out how to write excel formulas. But it can’t replace a human that actual knows because it can’t problem solve. The number of times I’ve been round in circles trying to get it to do something complicated and the best solution has to just ask someone else in the office that is more proficient We keep getting nudged towards using co-pilot to create efficiencies and it really fucks me off because it’s not at all be tested and we’re all being told to basically use it but be mindful, so I’m in a position where I need to effectively write my own teams policy for use based on the very broad company policy Teams are yanking away human created reports and are telling us to dump data into co-pilot for the same results but it absolutely isn’t, and has just shifted who is spending the time doing something not creating a more efficient process We need to know operationally what’s happening in the business to approve invoices. We can’t rely on what an AI tells us to do that. And it doesn’t have all the knowledge. It needs humans with an understanding of what’s happening operationally to report on events All that is to say that there seems to be this hurry to be reliant on AI at the detriment to ultimately everyone. It’s a resource hungry tool, that just shifts responsibility around, and has no actual intelligence. It can’t reason. It can only copy and replicate. So it’s shit for anything beyond really basic office based tasks and shit for anything creative – which I would argue needs some soul being poured into it for it to be worth a damn.
Crikey… didn’t mean for the entire comments section to descend into a debate on AI. I just wanted to know! 😂 Thanks to the channel owner for their relative candour – unfortunately that’s an unsubscribe for me, and suddenly it seems a little clearer in my mind why these promotional vids got no traction in the build up to Titan’s launch.
All that is to say that there seems to be this hurry to be reliant on AI at the detriment to ultimately everyone. It is remarkable the extent to which the technology is being so heavily pushed despite so much reticence from a lot of the people being made to use it. I think the idea from suppliers is to embed it in systems to the extent it becomes indispensable.
My feelings on AI are mixed and have evolved in the past couple of years since I started using it regularly at work. It can be an amazingly efficient time-saving tool for research purposes, and can do certain things that no human could do in the same amount of time. However, it still requires common-sense human oversight and still needs to have quite specific guardrails put in place to stop it going wildly off-piste. This is where Rushy was accurate saying “It cannot be relied on as an information source, but as a collector of sources, it’s highly efficient.” I appreciate that Gemini at least will list the sites it drew from, although the output can still be garbled, misinterpreted, or outright missing from the original source. Kinda like how for serious research Wikipedia is best used as a means of finding citations. Some of the panic is indeed similar to the controversy around Wikipedia circa the mid-2000s, when similar requirements for media literacy apply. Check your sources and never inherently trust a single source.
My feelings on AI are mixed and have evolved in the past couple of years since I started using it regularly at work. It can be an amazingly efficient time-saving tool for research purposes, and can do certain things that no human could do in the same amount of time. However, it still requires common-sense human oversight and still needs to have quite specific guardrails put in place to stop it going wildly off-piste. This is where Rushy was accurate saying “It cannot be relied on as an information source, but as a collector of sources, it’s highly efficient.” I appreciate that Gemini at least will list the sites it drew from, although the output can still be garbled, misinterpreted, or outright missing from the original source. Kinda like how for serious research Wikipedia is best used as a means of finding citations. Some of the panic is indeed similar to the controversy around Wikipedia circa the mid-2000s, when similar requirements for media literacy apply. Check your sources and never inherently trust a single source. The very distinct difference with AI is it is being pushed as a way to make decisions and to create things its all well and good having a place that collect sources, but it shouldn’t be doing anything more than that. It’s except it is pretending to, businesses are expecting it to, and it is being treated as if it can do those things. Again, it cannot reason, it cannot feel, judge, emote… Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia) is humans building an information source, AI is presenting information as if it’s been put together in the same careful way but all it’s done is read a lot of unverified sources and given a summary as fact.
The very distinct difference with AI is it is being pushed as a way to make decisions and to create things Yep, definitely. And these are aspects that I resist using it for, because certainly in the context of my work, people can always do it better. (There are some contexts in which AI decision-making can be beneficial, particularly when working with large data sets – for example, anticipating disease emergence and progression before it could ever be detected by other methods – but certainly in general at this point I would not trust significant decisions to AI.)
My older brother keeps talking about using AI to write a book and as the actual writer of the family it makes me want to bash my face against a wall.
My older brother keeps talking about using AI to write a book and as the actual writer of the family it makes me want to bash my face against a wall. Just point him to the AIdea for an episode forum thread. If that doesn’t put him off, I don’t know what will.
The very distinct difference with AI is it is being pushed as a way to make decisions and to create things It is very much the framing that is the problem yes, although the framing would be wrong without AI involved. If you made your decisions entirely based on replies you got on Quora you would not end up well. I watched a video about ChaCha a little while ago and it was rather errie how similar it was to modern AI search summaries, just done via crowdsourcing instead.
AI notwithstanding – I’ve been really impressed by the videos produced for the launch campaign – clearly a labour of love.
If there was a named artist attached to this and they claimed not to use AI then I would believe them. As things are, I think AI was possibly used as the basis for the paintings. Not sure where all this AI hullabaloo is coming from, because I could’ve sworn I saw an artist signature somewhere on the bottom right.
Briefly thought that they could do an episode where a ship was completely run by AI and how much of a disaster that would be, but they already did that in The End, for 3 million years, and it went fine.
Briefly thought that they could do an episode where a ship was completely run by AI Now an AI with cleavage, however-
So with all the negativity towards AI, how would you guys feel if Doug had used AI for his new special where he de-aged Craig and Chris? Because i suspect AI was the only way he was going to pull that off. He wasn’t going to have a whole Hollywood effects team CGI-ing out wrinkles and smoothing their faces over for days.
I don’t believe Doug would have used AI in the way you suggest. I think he would have deaged Craig with it, but kept his physical performance. Basically using AI for the process of “effects team CGI-out in wrinkles”. But not generating young Lister.
Well, he couldn’t really do that because, with what was described to us about the story, it would mean Lister had several scenes with himself, meaning that unless they clone Craig because filming starts, they would need a stand-in so Craig could have scenes with someone playing a younger version of himself. So presumably they would get a young actor and then put Craig’s face onto his performance. And since the show doesn’thave the budget of a Hollywood movie, it means doing it the easiest way possible, and that’s probably with AI.
I like the idea that they would have just used young Lister performances from existing rushes and outtakes from Series 1. I’m sure Doug could creatively write around those restrictions.
Well, he couldn’t really do that because, with what was described to us about the story, it would mean Lister had several scenes with himself, meaning that unless they clone Craig because filming starts, they would need a stand-in so Craig could have scenes with someone playing a younger version of himself. So presumably they would get a young actor and then put Craig’s face onto his performance. Why? They were able to have multiple Chris Barries back in 1988. Just use that technique again, but one is deaged.
Well, it would be simpler to film in front of a studio audience if someone were standing in for another character, rather than Craig doing it on his own in split-screen or green screen. And then also doing that with Chris. The old methods could still be used, but that was mostly done that way because that’s all they could do.
Has anyone seen ‘Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie’? They mix new footage of the characters with old footage in that and it is genuinely some of the best visual effects I have ever seen in a film, to the extent I genuinely can’t figure out how they managed to do it so convincingly. I think I’d rather see a new “young Lister” actor cast than anything with CGI/AI (I’d trust Doug to do this after how Brill young Rimmer was in ‘The Beginning’), unless they had the right old footage for the story. I think I’d be too distracted by de-ageing that wasn’t makeup.
They were able to have multiple Chris Barries back in 1988. It already seemed to be a standard effect by 1939 (Daredevils of the Red Circle). (Split screen, not AI deaging).
(I’d trust Doug to do this after how Brill young Rimmer was in ‘The Beginning’) A very fair point. To be honest, I kinda preferred him to Chris Barrie in that episode…
I would have been disappointed with Doug for using AI, honestly. Just got round to actually watching the Ian Symes/Andrew Marshall video. Very good, it’s interesting that Andrew says he’s more an admirer but isn’t a fan of Red Dwarf. I really felt for him having to do all the promotion without Rob.
