Italy wages war on progress with nationalist bans on lab-made meat and ChatGPT
Italy’s government is banning lab-grown meat, ChatGPT and basically anything that looks like progress. It’s a distraction technique that will be very painful for the country in the future, writes Elena Siniscalco
No more ChatGPT, no more lab-grown meat, no more insects in food or even English words. Yes, that’s right. This is modern-day Italy, hell-bent, it seems, on banning the future.
In attempting to defend its culture, Italy is also positioning itself against progress.
The lab-grown meat example is particularly striking: it’s simply not Italian to have “fake” meat. The ban is meant to defend “the health of our citizens, of our productive model, of our quality, of our culture, to put it simply of our food sovereignty”, said the minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida. As if innovation per se was the antithesis of Italian culture.
There are problems with this ban – the first being it is basically useless. The government can’t ban imports, it could only ban the production of lab-grown meat. This means when the market for it will open up – and likely explode – Italian companies will be able to import the product but not make it themselves, losing even the possibility of playing what increasingly looks like a very lucrative game.
There is no scientific analysis suggesting lab-grown meat could have any negative impact on our health either, despite what was implied by Lollobrigida. If anything, several studies point to the great environmental benefits that this burgeoning market could bring.
Some say when it comes to food, all Italians are conservatives. It’s probably true: a refusal to engage with the possibility of lab-grown meat “made in Italy” can be found historically on both sides of the political spectrum.
And it’s not only the government: indeed it wasn’t Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, but the privacy regulator who decided to ban AI chatbot ChatGPT. Just days ago it disappeared from Italians’ google searches, after the regulator complained about the lack of clarity on how users’ data is collected and stored. More than one Twitter user jokingly said the ban was implemented after ChatGPT said it was acceptable to put pineapple on pizza.
Italy is the first country to implement this type of ban. It’s been shaped as a battle between good and evil, between the protectors of privacy and the evil giants collecting your personal information without your consent. It’s also political: one of the members of the board of the privacy authority rocked up to an interview with a t-shirt reading “Privacy First”.
But ChatGPT is not going away; if anything it will likely be incorporated into the way employees work and students learn. There’s a difference between regulating AI – which is necessary and impellent – and banning it. The latter means choosing not to engage, and lagging behind when what looks scary now becomes mainstream later.
Part of it is the old-fashioned political strategy of distraction – and you can see it in the UK as much as in Italy. When governments have problems, they breed policies and new laws like golden retrievers breed puppies. And Meloni’s government has more than one problem to worry about. People keep on drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Italian shores; there is increased scrutiny of the government’s inability to coherently spend the European funds for recovery; public services struggle, and young researchers move abroad because there are no funds for their projects, stifling innovation.
So the idea of banning English words from public use and job descriptions, and of teaching university courses in foreign languages only if there are foreign students enrolled, somehow makes sense. It screams “Italianness” from the rooftops – something this government loves.
It’s kind of funny to think that a government is banning insects in pizza – and after all, it could only happen in Italy, where a love of food is synonymous with national pride. But the humour has a bite when you think that some of these decisions will have an impact in five or ten years; and that a country that desperately needs to embrace innovation in all its forms is doing exactly the opposite. It’s not even a matter of conservatism or progressivism, in the end; it’s just daft.