Business

Culture chat — In the age of AI, what counts as art?

Published

8 hours ago

October 7, 2024

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘In the age of AI, what counts as art?’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life & Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. My colleague John Thornhill recently saw a movie that he really liked that wasn’t made by humans. It was auto-generated by a machine so that it’s never shown the same way twice. The film is called Eno and it takes 500 hours of footage shot over the lifetime of the artist Brian Eno. Humans were involved, of course. They shot the original footage. Human editors cut that footage into scenes, but after the initial edit, an algorithm was set loose that combines those scenes into new orders every time you press play. It plays with the ideas of memory and truth. Here’s a clip of an unreleased Eno recording that’s in the film called All I Remember.

[AUDIO CLIP FROM ALL I REMEMBER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Brian Eno has always been experimental. He’s worked with musicians like David Bowie. He pioneered the genre of ambient music, and John is very interested in experimentation. He’s our innovation editor and he writes a lot about new technologies and generative AI. He wrote about this film in his recent column, and when I read it, it felt really like finally a tangible example of the kinds of things that might be to come. So for anyone who’s also a little worried about how generative AI might affect art and culture in the future, John has kindly joined us today to talk through it. John Hi. Welcome to the show.

John Thornhill
Hi, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks for being here. OK, so why don’t we start with this film? The filmmaker said you saw one of 52 quintillion possible versions. Is that right?

John Thornhill
Yeah, That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
It seems like a lot. I don’t even know what that number means.

John Thornhill
And they said it would make quite a boxset if you were to compile it all together.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me what that actually looks like? You know, I feel like we’re used to following one narrative that a filmmaker decided on before we were ever involved. And this sounds like chaos, honestly. Yeah. How would you explain it?

John Thornhill
Well, as you were saying, Eno himself is an incredibly kind of creative, quirky individual. And he didn’t want a kind of standard biopic. So Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, who are the people behind it Eno went to him and said, well, how about we throw all of the archival footage into a hopper and then write software that would extract different scenes and pull out themes and ideas and make connections and almost have a kind of kaleidoscopic view of Eno’s creative life.

And every single version, the 52 quintillion possible versions of it, would pull out different aspects of his life and his creativity. And that clearly appealed to Eno and so he gave his blessing for this film to go ahead. And what I think is extraordinary about it is that although it does differ every time you see it, there is a kind of curious, intuitive logic that kind of threads it all together. And so it does make sense. It’s not just kind of a random assembly of scenes from Eno’s life.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me about that? What was the experience of watching it like? You said, that it was, it had some jagged juxtapositions, but that it did have a clear narrative arc.

John Thornhill
Yeah. Brendan Dawes in particular who kind of wrote the software for this. And they did want to give it some loose structure. So they had an introductory scene and they had a concluding scene. And because that had to kind of bookend the film, as it were. And then they had human editors who edited a hundred scenes from different and really important parts of his opus, as it were, which they wanted to have as kind of standalone elements of the film. But then the software was really very much kind of picking out different associations, connections between different aspects of his career and so on.

One particular film, it might go very heavily on his association with David Bowie. On another one, it might focus on Roxy music. On another. It might go completely differently into his thinking about creative art and so on. So I think that’s really what was fascinating about it. You knew that all of these connections and ideas were being meshed together in a way that they had never been meshed together before. And to my mind anyway, that made it really quite fun and interesting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I can imagine. John, how are critics reacting to this movie? I imagine it’s a hard thing to write a review of.

John Thornhill
Yes, for sure. I mean, I read a lot of the reviews of the film and what was fascinating is that they all seemed to undergo something of an existential crisis in them reviewing the film because they knew that the film that they saw was not going to be seen by anybody else. And so the reviews tended to focus on the nature of the project itself and the technology that was used and the kind of structure of it and the intent of the producers and so on, rather than the content of the film itself. And I think that’s fascinating from a kind of an artistic perspective because that’s part of the value of art in one sense, is that it provokes conversations.

To some extent Eno does that brilliantly, I think, because everyone can have a very legitimately different opinion about the art that they went to see, but it also loses something to the extent that if you go and see a great work of art, a Mona Lisa or you read Middlemarch or whatever. You can have legitimate differences of opinion based on the same thing that you’re experiencing or reading. In this case, you’re arguing about something different. So I think that does raise a kind of whole new question about the nature of art as well. And is it something that we collectively agree is art and there’s the defined and clear definition of what it is, or is it permanently kind of fluctuating it?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
John, one of the things that I really loved about your piece is this point that you made, that the film reminds us that there really isn’t one singular truth when it comes to how we tell the story about our lives. You know, like a traditional documentary tells a story in one way, but we tell our own stories in all these different ways. There’s the story that we tell on LinkedIn. There’s the story that we tell out at a bar or on a date. There’s the story that others tell about us, and they’re all different, but they can all be true. Can you say more about that?

John Thornhill
Well, it certainly plays very much into the debate, I think, about generative AI at the moment, and we have these extraordinary models like ChatGPT and so on, which we’re all now using. And one of the big features of that, which many people consider a bug, is that they hallucinate. They just make stuff up. And we’ve obviously had cases of lawyers going to court with kind of GPT-generated briefings which contain completely fictitious legal cases, which the judges in those cases don’t take too kindly to.

But what struck me about the Eno film, which is, I have to stress, not generated by generative AI, it was a kind of proprietary software that Brendan Dawes wrote, therefore, what the material in it is true, you know, it was recorded. It happened. It was taken from real life. It wasn’t inventing anything. But it did show this extraordinary kind of kaleidoscopic aspects of people’s lives. And I’m sure that we all have this situation, that we have false memories ourselves, and we can think that things happened to us in our lives, that we think that we said this on a particular occasion. And in fact, when you actually go through someone’s archive, the material is all truthful to the extent that any artistic material is truthful and it is creating linkages between genuine footage.

And so I think in that sense, it struck me that this film is truthful because it’s kaleidoscopic. It’s showing very many different aspects of Eno that even he might not have thought about. And that is quite a contrast to some of the generative AI models and films that are being created of that which are really inventing stuff in somewhat crazy and fairly random ways.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. OK. So you’re saying that the, you know, film isn’t generative AI itself, but it still could help inform what’s possible in the future with generative AI?

John Thornhill
So I think the difference is that the Eno film very much had a kind of guiding human brain. And there was a film director who was saying, I want to make a film. These are the constraints that we’re going to impose on it. This is the material we’re going to use, and these are the prompts that we’re going to give it in a way and set of directions, that these are the scenes that we think are important, have to be incorporated in one way or the other. And so there was a kind of human framing for that.

What you get with generative AI models is often completely random in the sense that there is no human guiding framework for that. And the best way, I think, to think of a lot of these generative AI models is that they’re almost super, super sophisticated, kind of autocomplete functions. They are trained on the probability of one word following another to the nth degree. And therefore, they are quite predictive in that sense. But there is no guiding principle or human steerage, as it were. And so I think that’s when you see AI films, they can be quite inspired in their own way, but there is far more kind of randomness built into the process.

[THE RUN-THROUGH TRAILER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So, so far, this all feels pretty harmless and interesting, but there’s a lot of anxiety around the risks of AI, and I wonder if that applies here, like how we go from cute experimental film to like, you know, the robots are in charge. I read a piece recently in The New York Times about, you know, what will happen if AI gets trained on AI, that there’s, you know, all this content being generated now by AI, and then the models are training based on this inhuman interpretation of that content, which can sometimes be wrong. And then another model gets trained on that and trained on that. And suddenly there can be a world in which, like everything that gets interpreted, just starts to become gibberish.

John Thornhill
Yes. That’s a big concern, I think of some AI researchers now that the creation of what they call synthetic data can be incredibly useful in helping to train some of these models. So, for example, the AlphaGo program, I got very good at playing the game Go because it played thousands of games against itself and it created synthetic data which it then trained on to become better. But you can create synthetic data which poisons the well, as it were, and it is cannot be fully relied upon. And there’s been some very interesting research coming out saying that this could lead to model collapse.

I’m not enough of a technological expert to know how serious this is to be taken, but it’s certainly something that is being talked about quite openly now. But as you say, the ability of our models to generate synthetic data can be useful, but can also actually jeopardise the whole reliability of the models themselves.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I’m trying to envision an example of a way that, you know, if these generative AI models were more sophisticated and used to create content with more freedom than the Eno film’s algorithm allowed, what would be possible? I mean, like, would it be things like, you know, it could build a film based on another guy that exists in the world named Brian Eno. Or it could build a film that shows different versions of the film to different races or ethnicities or I’m just kind of trying to . . .

John Thornhill
We’re just freewheeling a bit, I mean, I guess we’re . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Freewheel, yeah, I think . . .

John Thornhill
Where this could end up is that . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

John Thornhill
. . . generative AI could write Eno-style music. It could create wholly new music, taking his back catalogue, as it were, and all the artists that he has worked with and then come up with music as though it was produced by Eno and which nobody has ever heard before. Similarly, you could invent an entire script and generative AI could put words into Eno’s mouth. It could analyse everything he has ever said in his life that has been recorded and then come up with Eno-like statements. And then you could actually create an avatar that looks almost identical to Eno. And so you could invent a whole film that was completely fictitious, that had no truth in it at all in that sense, but was really very plausible. It would look like Eno, it would sound like Eno, his music would sound like Eno, he’d speak like Eno. And yet he was directly generating none of it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. OK. Yeah, that’s helpful. Those are some of those questions that I think that we have gotten pretty good at asking. Like, I find myself a bit more vigilant about misinformation than I ever was. You know, sometimes I’m watching a clip online and I think that looks suspicious. Maybe it’s fake. Maybe it’s been manipulative. I don’t think I ever would have asked that 15 years ago. I feel like there’s maybe other questions we should be asking ourselves now. Like kind of more sophisticated ones that I don’t know yet. What should we be asking ourselves? You know, knowing what you know about this?

John Thornhill
Well, I think we’re definitely moving into a world where it will be almost impossible to identify what art has been created by humans and what is being created by a machine. And instinctively, we have an incredible kind of visceral reaction against that. At the FT Weekend Festival in London a few years ago, we had the audience listen to a Bach chorale that was genuine one that Bach himself wrote, and one that was generated by a computer. And the audience split, I think, 52-48 per cent. They did recognise the genuine Bach. But people were horrified. The people who wrote, the 48 per cent who didn’t recognise the genuine artefact as it were, felt horrified that they had somehow been cheated. But really, I mean, is that the right reaction? If the music gives you the same emotional response, whether it’s created by a human or a machine in that sense, doesn’t really matter, does it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, yeah. I can sort of understand why they’re horrified. Gosh. OK. But you seem to be kind of excited about this, which is interesting. Why?

John Thornhill
I mean, I think it’s very interesting in the realm of art in particular, isn’t it, where deception is, in a way, part of the artistic process. You know, that clearly doesn’t apply. You really don’t want your kind of bank to go in for deception in a similar way. So there are kind of hard guardrails that you want to reinforce amongst kind of daily life.

But in the field of art, I think it’s really quite exciting and possibly inspirational that you can get machines to create artefacts in a way that they’ve never been created before. And we’re talking, well, I’ve just been talking about mimicking human art. But, you know, it will be possible, I think, increasingly for machines to come up with new ways of conceptualising images or words or text or music, which really would be a spur to human creativity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, interesting. So it’s like the danger that this could be in other realms could actually be a feature or a positive in the art realm.

John Thornhill
I think it’s also interesting people in the artistic well, to the extent that I interact with them, tend to be excited by the technology and the possibilities of the technology rather than being scared by it, as it’s now increasingly common in other fields, I think. And of course Hollywood actors and script writers have legitimate concerns and they will go out and protest and strike about the indiscriminate use of AI. But I’m also struck by how many artists are now embracing it and trying to use it in very creative ways, which I think is quite exciting.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So it seems to me like this idea of AI-generated art is challenging what we think of art as based on who or what it’s made by. Right? Like if it’s made by a machine, is it art? It’s a big question. And then the Eno film is kind of challenging our experience of art because everybody’s watching a different version, right? So, like, we aren’t even talking about the same piece of art when we’re talking about this film. So this conversation, maybe part of why I’m finding it hard to ask you about it is kind of pushing it two boundaries at the same time in terms of how we think of art.

John Thornhill
Yes, for sure. I think that does raise a kind of whole new question about the nature of art as well. And is it something that we collectively agree is art and there’s a defined and clear definition of what it is? Or is it permanently kind of fluctuating? And one of the most fascinating things about this Eno film was that they, at the Venice Film Festival, I think, they played the film rather than being constrained by 90 minutes, they put it on a continuous loop, as it were. And I think if I’m right and it played for about 160 hours nonstop, because you could do that with the software, it could just take out all of this material and surface it in different ways. And it was obviously running through the night when there was no one in the cinema to see it. I think there’s something wonderful about the idea of a kind of film being shown, which no one is watching. And it’s a bit like the debate about if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has it happened? So I think the whole nature of art in that sense is rather fluid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Absolutely. And that is the beauty of it and the difficulty of it all in one. John, this has been so interesting, so thought provoking. Thanks for coming on the show.

John Thornhill
My pleasure. Thanks, Lilah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. We’ve linked to John’s piece about the Brian Eno film in the show notes that we’ve also included some other interesting links about AI there, which the FT has, of course, been covering a lot. Also on the show, notes are places to find me on email and on Instagram. I’m @LilahRap and I love chatting with you online about culture.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s our incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. We had help this week from Persis Love. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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Business

Don’t miss – HTSI’s most popular stories

Published

5 mins ago

October 7, 2024

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Here are the articles you loved last week, from Tom Hanks’s communist cars to a crisp addict’s love letter

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Money

First-time buyers must act NOW to save £15k on property purchase – cheapest places to get on the ladder

Published

16 mins ago

October 7, 2024

NewsAdmin

First-time buyers must act NOW to save £15k on property purchase - cheapest places to get on the ladder

THOUSANDS of first-time buyers have been warned to act now to save up to £15,000 in Stamp Duty.

The amount you can spend on a property before incurring Stamp Duty will fall on March 31 2025, penalising thousands of would-be homeowners.

The average price of a first home can vary hugely depending on where you live

Stamp Duty is a tax you may have to pay if you buy a home in England or Northern Ireland that is worth more than a certain price.

For most homeowners this is above £250,000.

But the amount that a first-time buyer could spend was increased to £425,000 in the September 2022 mini-budget.

First-time buyers also benefit from a further discounted rate on property purchases of up to £625,000.

From April these thresholds will plummet.

Properties with a value of up to £300,000 will not incur a Stamp Duty charge, while the reduced rate will only apply to homes worth up to £500,000.

The changes will mean that someone buying a property worth £425,000 would currently pay no Stamp Duty but from April will owe the taxman £6,250.

But in some areas of London first-time buyers could be slapped with tax bills which are £15,000 higher than before once the thresholds are slashed.

Should I act now?

It usually takes around 25 weeks from listing a property to completing a sale, according to property website Zoopla, which means buyers have limited time to beat the deadline.

David Hollingworth, of mortgage broker L&C, said first-time buyers should act now to avoid being penalised.

Unveiling the Hidden Costs of New Home Mortgages

“First time buyers wanting to be sure that they can take advantage of the elevated Stamp Duty relief before it reverts to the lower levels in March will want to be in the process as soon as possible.”

Although a first-time buyer may be able to move quickly, the person they are buying the property from may be in a transaction chain, he explains.

This is when you want to buy a house but need to wait until your seller buys their next property.

How to get the best deal on your mortgage

IF you’re looking for a traditional type of mortgage, getting the best rates depends entirely on what’s available at any given time.

There are several ways to land the best deal.

Usually the larger the deposit you have the lower the rate you can get.

If you’re remortgaging and your loan-to-value ratio (LTV) has changed, you’ll get access to better rates than before.

Your LTV will go down if your outstanding mortgage is lower and/or your home’s value is higher.

A change to your credit score or a better salary could also help you access better rates.

And if you’re nearing the end of a fixed deal soon it’s worth looking for new deals now.

You can lock in current deals sometimes up to six months before your current deal ends.

Leaving a fixed deal early will usually come with an early exit fee, so you want to avoid this extra cost.

But depending on the cost and how much you could save by switching versus sticking, it could be worth paying to leave the deal – but compare the costs first.

To find the best deal use a mortgage comparison tool to see what’s available.

You can also go to a mortgage broker who can compare a much larger range of deals for you.

Some will charge an extra fee but there are plenty who give advice for free and get paid only on commission from the lender.

You’ll also need to factor in fees for the mortgage, though some have no fees at all.

You can add the fee – sometimes more than £1,000 – to the cost of the mortgage, but be aware that means you’ll pay interest on it and so will cost more in the long term.

You can use a mortgage calculator to see how much you could borrow.

Remember you’ll have to pass the lender’s strict eligibility criteria too, which will include affordability checks and looking at your credit file.

You may also need to provide documents such as utility bills, proof of benefits, your last three month’s payslips, passports and bank statements.

Buying a property can also take longer than people think as it may take time for an offer to be accepted because of practical issues or completing legal paperwork.

He adds: “Having as long as possible to keep things on track for a March deadline will be important, especially with Christmas on the horizon.”

The festive season frequently brings the property market to a standstill which can slow the process of buying a house and push completion dates into the New Year.

Incentives such as Stamp Duty “holidays” can also create a cliff edge deadline, which can create a busier period in the property market as buyers rush to complete their purchases.

But there may be hope for buyers who have not yet started the process.

The Chancellor could unveil plans to extend the policy in the Budget on October 31, which would give buyers more chance to complete their purchase.

The last Stamp Duty holiday was extended for three months in order to allow buyers to complete on their purchase if they were stuck in a housing chain.

The holiday had been introduced to help keep the property market afloat during the pandemic after thousands of property transactions fell through.

It was extended after calls from home buyers and experts to allow more time to finalise property sales.

Where are the cheapest areas to buy?

The average price of a first-time buyer property can vary substantially depending on where you live.

Hull is the cheapest area in the UK to purchase a home for the first-time.

A typical first property in the area is worth £114,300, more than half of the average sold price of a home in the UK, which is £328,457 according to Zoopla.

Sunderland comes in second place at £122,600 for an average first home.

Meanwhile, Burnley and Dundee were also ranked as affordable areas, coming in third and fourth place respectively at £128,800 and £131,700.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

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Business

Iran dismisses speculation about fate of absent Quds Force commander

Published

27 mins ago

October 7, 2024

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

The commander of the overseas arm of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard, who has not been seen in public for more than a week, is alive and well, according to his deputy, dismissing speculation that he was killed by Israeli air strikes targeting Hizbollah in Lebanon.

Esmail Ghaani, who leads the Guard’s overseas military service, the Quds Force, was reportedly in Lebanon to offer help to Tehran’s regional ally Hizbollah around the time that Israel ramped up its offensive against the militant group. Israel has targeted Hizbollah leaders with waves of air strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut and elsewhere in the country.

The group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by Israeli strikes that flattened at least six residential blocks in the Dahiyeh suburb of the Lebanese capital late last month. Israel also targeted Hashem Safieddine, the heir apparent to Nasrallah, in strikes on Dahiyeh last week.

However, Brigadier General Iraj Masjedi, Ghaani’s deputy for co-ordination affairs, told local reporters on Monday that there was no need for the Guards to release any official statement to shut down the rumours.

“He’s healthy and well and doing his job,” Masjedi said of Ghaani, while declining to provide further details.

Ghaani assumed command of the Quds Force, which arms, trains and advises Iranian-backed militant groups across the region, in 2020 after its then-chief Qassem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq, although he does not have the same public profile of his predecessor.

Soleimani was revered in Iran and among its allies in the region, which include Hizbollah, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Iraq’s Shia militias.

The Guards have not confirmed whether Ghaani travelled to Beirut recently, although another Iranian commander, Abbas Nilforoushan, was reportedly killed alongside Nasrallah.

Ghaani’s last public appearance was more than a week ago, at a commemoration ceremony for Nasrallah at Hizbollah’s office in Tehran. He was notably absent from Friday prayers in Tehran last week, an event that was unusually led by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

He was also missing from a recent ceremony to honour the commander behind the recent strikes on Israel, which involved about 190 ballistic missiles. The head of the Quds Force would have been expected to attend both events.

Israel has killed at least 19 members in the 12 months since Hamas launched its attack on Israel, primarily in Syria. If Ghaani has been killed in Lebanon, then it could prompt Iran to consider further strikes against Israel, analysts say.

Iran’s leaders have adopted a defiant stance in the face of rising tensions with Israel and the escalating threat of an all-out Middle East war.

President Masoud Pezeshkian flew to Qatar last week as Iranian airspace was closed due to security fears, while foreign minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Beirut and Syria as a demonstration of solidarity with Hizbollah.

Oil minister Mohsen Paknejad also visited the oilfields and ports in the south of the country, where he promised workers a pay rise, amid speculation that Israel might target Iran’s oil installations in retaliation for the missile strikes.

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Money

Grainger points to strong rental growth during financial year

Published

38 mins ago

October 7, 2024

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Occupancy across the group’s portfolio stood at 97.4% at the end of September, according to trading update.

The post Grainger points to strong rental growth during financial year appeared first on Property Week.

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Business

Norway’s Equinor takes 10% stake in renewables group Ørsted

Published

47 mins ago

October 7, 2024

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Norway’s state-controlled oil and gas company Equinor has bought a 10 per cent stake in Denmark’s Ørsted, becoming the second-largest shareholder in the world’s biggest offshore wind farm developer behind the Danish government.

Anders Opedal, Equinor’s chief executive, said on Monday that the shareholding — worth about $2.5bn — had been accumulated over time and was part of the Norwegian group’s growing focus on renewables.

“Equinor has a long-term perspective and will be a supportive owner in Ørsted. This is a countercyclical investment in a leading developer, and a premium portfolio of operating offshore wind assets,” he added.

Ørsted is one of the biggest renewable energy companies, evolving out of Danish Oil and Natural Gas in the past decade to become the leading developer of offshore wind farms from the North Sea to the US and Taiwan.

But the group, which is controlled by the Danish state through a 50.1 per cent stake, has struggled in recent years due to a botched expansion in the US that led to big writedowns on projects and the suspension of its dividend until at least 2025. It also scrapped plans for a green fuel plant in Sweden this year.

Shares in Ørsted, which have fallen almost 70 per cent from their 2021 peak, rose 6 per cent by Monday afternoon following the news that Equinor was taking a 9.8 per cent stake. Equinor’s shares fell 4 per cent.

The Norwegian oil and gas major said it had no current plans to raise the stake further than 10 per cent.

Biraj Borkhataria, head of global energy transition research at RBC, said the stake gave Equinor access to offshore wind assets “without the risk on construction and delivery, as well as supply chains”.

He added: “Equinor has in the past shown willingness to buy public entities.”

Ørsted currently has 10.4 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity, and is aiming to reach 38GW by 2030.

Opedal said as a “rule of thumb” it would cost about $4bn to develop 1GW compared with the $2.5bn it is paying for the stake in Ørsted.

“We find this an attractive investment, creating long term value for our shareholders,” he added.

Equinor said it was “supportive” of the Danish group’s management and strategy and would not seek board representation.

“The offshore wind industry is currently facing a set of challenges, but we remain confident in the long term outlook for the sector, and the crucial role offshore wind will play in the energy transition,” Opedal said.

Equinor has recently said it would reduce the size of its renewable energy unit in line with other oil and gas groups scaling back their ambitions in the sector.

The Norwegian group has said it wants to have half its gross investments in 2030 to be in renewable energy or low-carbon projects but it has faced fierce criticism from environmentalists over what they perceive as its slow progress and its continued heavy investment in oil and gas.

Equinor has less than 1GW in renewable capacity as of the end of 2023 but is trying to reach 12-16GW by 2030, according to its 2023 annual report.

It has also faced struggles developing offshore wind in the US, where its Empire Wind project has been affected by higher costs.

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Travel

I’ve been on 50 caravan beaks with my family – my three tried-and-tested tricks for cheap holiday park stays

Published

55 mins ago

October 7, 2024

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Rachel, who is known as the Caravanning Mummy, has been going on caravan holidays for the last five years

A FAMILY in the UK who have been on 56 holidays in their caravan have shared their best budget-friendly staycation tips.

Known as The Caravanning Mummy, travel expert, and mum-of-two, Rachel shares travel tips and destination guides on Instagram, including how to make breaks budget-friendly while keeping the kids entertained.

The family-of-four have been in 56 holidays in their Bailey Of Bristol Phoenix 650 caravanCredit: The caravanning mummy

Rachel purchased her caravan back in 2019, with her family spending the school holidays and weekends exploring the UK in their Bailey Of Bristol Phoenix 650 caravan.

The family-of-four have been on 56 caravan holidays over the last five years, so it’s safe to say Rachel has found the best ways to keep costs down without compromising on the fun.

Rachel encouraged holidaymakers to book a Certified Location with their caravan or motorhome.

Certified locations (CL sites) are small, privately-owned campsites for caravans and motorhomes that are exclusive to members of The Caravan and Motorhome Club.

She told Sun Online Travel: “I would say CL sites are probably around £20 per night for a pitch, which is obviously pretty good. It means you’re looking at around £40 for a weekend pitch.

“The Caravan and Motorhome Club sites are great for beginners because they have all the key facilities and you know what you’re going to get.

“They’re about half the price of a big site but you do get less facilities, so that is something to consider.”

To keep the family entertained while keeping costs low, Rachel recommended making the most of supermarket loyalty schemes.

She added: “We use Tesco vouchers massively when we’re going away because it almost halves the cost of entry into top-rated attractions.

Tesco Clubcard Vouchers can be spent at theme parks like Thorpe Park, Legoland, Chessington World of Adventures and Alton Towers.

Best of British: The Sun’s Travel Editor Lisa Minot reveals her favourite caravan cooking tips

Entry tickets to places like Cadbury World, Warwick Castle, the Eden Project, the Black Country Living Museum, Conkers, Madame Tussauds and various Sea Life Centres can also be bought using Clubcard vouchers.

Children aged between five and 15 can also apply for a Blue Peter badge, which also provides free entry to a range of UK attractions.

The Caravanning Mummy also recommended purchasing a membership to the National Trust.

She added: “The other tip I always recommend is getting a membership with the National Trust.

“While it might seem a bit random for a caravan holiday, it means you have entry to a nice stately home, or an indoor attraction, which is great for rainy days.

“These places often have large grounds so kids can have a run around too, and they’re often equipped with a cafe so you can have tea and cake.

“A lot of the places have ponds with ducks, so we always have some porridge oats in our pockets so the kids can feed the ducks.”

Later this month, Rachel will be sharing more caravanning tips at the Motorhome & Caravan Show at the NEC in Birmingham.

Rachel’s Favourite Campsites in Swanage

IN THE last five years, Rachel and her family have stayed at three campsites in Swanage – here’s what they’re like…

Haycraft Club Campsite
Located near Harmans Cross Train Station, holidaymakers can board a train on the Swanage Railway line to reach Swanage. The site is currently closed for refurbishment but is set to reopen in March.
Touring pitches start from £17 per night.

Hunter’s Moon Club Campsite
Set in Wareham, Hunter’s Moon Club Campsite is slightly further afield with holidaymakers needing to drive to reach the seaside.
Touring pitches start from £15.60 per night.

Norden Farm Campsite
The family-run campsite is Rachel’s favourite place to bag a pitch in Dorset because it is also a working farm, adding a touch of rural and rustic charm. Located on the Wareham-Swanage Road just outside of Corfe Castle, the campsite is close to famous beaches like Studland and Sandbanks. The site is open until October 31 – depending on the weather. Touring pitches start from £23.

Earlier this month, Rachel revealed her favourite place for a UK break in her caravan, with a quintessential seaside town bagging the top spot.

Meanwhile, these are the top-rated holiday parks with on-site waterparks and pools.