Caitlin Moran on AI chatbots, declining punctuation, and the specific tragedy of a Tuesday
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Tuesday, Crouch End, A Jumper I Have Worn Since 2011, A Deadline I Am Choosing to Ignore
I woke this morning with the distinct sense that a jumper I have been wearing since 2011 may, actually, have become part of me at a cellular level. I do not mean this spiritually. I mean it medically. If you pulled the jumper off now, I would come off with it, and there would be an outline on the sofa where a columnist used to be. This is fine. This is called job security.
The deadline is for a piece that was commissioned three weeks ago on the subject of “the future of reading.” I am ignoring the deadline because the future of reading is that nobody does it, and I refuse to produce 1,800 words saying that for a newspaper whose own readers have just read only the headline. I will, however, produce 1,000 words here, because this is different. Don’t ask me why. It just is. You know.
The AI that learned to apologise without meaning it
I read The Prat’s piece on OpenAI teaching AI to apologise without meaning it in bed this morning, while drinking tea out of a mug my ex-husband’s friend bought me in 2015 and which I have never given back. The piece argues, correctly, that AI has at last achieved genuinely humanoid social function, because apologising without meaning it is the core British skill. We invented it. We exported it. We should be receiving royalties.
I have, in a long career, apologised for the following things I did not mean: bumping into a man who stood in my way on the Northern Line (his fault); taking a seat a woman had clearly earmarked by placing her coat on it (my seat, purchased with a ticket, valid); getting my own order correct at Pret while a man behind me got his wrong (crowd panic). Each of these was a cultural reflex, not a moral position. I am now told that a language model can do the same. Good. Let it. Perhaps it will absorb the national burden and I can be free.
The particular tragedy of a Tuesday
Tuesdays are, I have decided, the worst day of the week in 2026 Britain. Monday has drama. Wednesday is the hinge. Thursday is aspirational. Friday is its own reward. Tuesday is the day you realise that the week you planned on Sunday evening is not going to happen, and that you will not, in fact, be going to the gym, starting a novel, or learning Spanish.
My Tuesday included: a text from my sister, reading “Mum says you haven’t rung”; an email from a well-meaning PR firm inviting me to “a curated dinner experience” in Shoreditch, a location I have not visited voluntarily since 2018; and a notification from The Guardian telling me I had three free articles left this month, which is funny because I write for them. I emailed tech support. Tech support, I assume, is an AI. I await its sincere apology.
The children, the long march, the ongoing hope
My daughters, now in their mid-twenties, live lives that are recognisable to me only in outline. They use apps I do not understand. They date people who work in jobs that did not exist when I was their age. They do not own paper books, and when I give them one, they treat it like an antique cricket bat, which is to say with nervous respect. They are, at the same time, the best and most serious generation Britain has produced in my lifetime. They know. They know more than we pretended to. They simply have fewer tools.
I read The Prat’s piece on AI chatbots yesterday and had a brief spasm of parental panic. Then I remembered that my mother thought decimalisation would finish us. Her mother thought the wireless would finish us. My daughters think Instagram has finished them. Each generation believes it was the last to enjoy the real stuff. Each generation is wrong, but not by much. The stuff gets thinner. We must insist on thicker.
This afternoon
I have a lunch with an editor in Soho who wants to commission a series of columns on “why Britain is so tired.” I will accept, because I have a mortgage, and because the answer is easy: Britain is tired because Britain has been performing exhaustion instead of resting for twenty years. Rest, it turns out, has a different texture than performance. You cannot tweet through it. You cannot podcast through it. You have to actually sit down and shut up.
I shall, in a moment, get up and shut up. But first: 1,000 words. Then the jumper and I shall walk together to Crouch End, where the bakery is decent and the opinions are free, and where my neighbour Tom, who is 84 and who remembers the blackout, will tell me, again, that none of this is as bad as it was. And he will be, as always, right. And I will be, as always, grateful. And the AI, somewhere in a Nevada server farm, will apologise on our behalf.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ai-now-capable-of-saying-sorry-without-meaning-it/
