Robin Hunt at Sam’s Cafe reflects on the fight to get The Guardian to take the internet seriously in the 1990s

ROBIN Hunt was one of the first journalists to get to grips with the early onset of the world wide web, and is credited with pushing through the Guardian’s pioneering move to online while head of new media there.

He told me this week how the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) reminded him of the birth of the internet, when only very people could perceive how seismic that was going to be.

“It’s like an atom bomb that is about to hit,” he told me in Sam’s Café, Primrose Hill, where an exhibition of his artworks is on display.

Now 65 and living off Finchley Road in Golders Green, Mr Hunt described his body of work as “undoubtedly a calming focus in a noisy mental landscape of infinite imagery: a world of Chat GPT and fake news and a trillion TikToks”.

They are images of sunlight taken on his phone that he calls “Ovids”, in a nod to Roman poet Ovid behind Metamorphoses and also the Covid pandemic.

Mr Hunt said: “In that first spring of Covid, do you remember how the sunshine came out and – apart from what the pandemic was doing – there was really lovely, more angular light.”

He plays with the textures in an app called Camera 2, and writes accompanying stories.

He said: “I started this journey during an already uneasy and shifting time in history when politics and the speed of social and anti-social media makes us twitchy and disconnected; profoundly affects our mental health”

He met an art mentor at Camden Arts Centre and now has a book of his Ovids coming out, and a series of exhibitions later this year.

Mr Hunt grew up in south London and got his first media break at the trade magazine, Office Equipment Index, reviewing electric typewriters and the like.

He wrote a book about the merging physical and the digital world, Retailisation, that predicted coming changes to the high street, and was later posted out to Boston by The Times to interview an internet expert about the emerging phenomenon.

“For a minute, I really knew what I was talking about. But it was just luck, the way I surfed that particular time. Because even people back then who wrote about the digital world were still quite analogue. The fight to persuade people at The Guardian about the internet was really something. Now it is fantastic. But back in the 90s, it was a real struggle.”

Last week, Mr Hunt went to see the CEO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, Sam Altman, who was giving a talk at UCL.

“My antenna was really screaming because I had sat in a room 25 years earlier with everyone talking about how great the internet was going to be – and it felt so similar,” he said.

“But the thing about those early talks about the internet was that it was really inspiring – it was about information going to be free, education going to change, it was going to be egalitarian – stuff like that.

“This event at UCL was like an investor’s report; third-quarter sales stuff. I am a huge fan of AI, what it did for the Covid vaccine, for town planning, for art even. But what it doesn’t want to be is owned by the same blokes who own Facebook, Meta and Twitter.

“At the moment the narrative around AI is about regulation. Well, good luck with that, as we are long gone from that. Sometimes it’s about fake news. Also, long gone.

“For me the really big AI thing… well, it hasn’t happened yet – and we don’t know what it’s going to be. But we cannot ignore it. Goldman Sachs wrote a report the other day talking about 300 million job losses.”

He added: “But I think there is a way it can all work in tandem. If you look at social media mapped against the growth of festivals, for example. There is still this desire to be together and physical. I think there will be a premium in crafts.

“I am writing a book for God’s sake. And I remember they said e-books would take over absolutely everything. But books are thriving. I’m just so happy to be involved in the physical world of making art.”