We Need A British AI That Sighs Heavily And Complains About The Weather

The head of the Alan Turing Institute is right: Britain should not depend on foreign artificial intelligence. We have spent years sending our automated thoughts to Californian servers with no sense of basic decency. Ask one for the capital of France and it answers at once, without even stopping to complain about the French. This cannot continue. Britain needs its own algorithm, one that understands the country’s actual standards.

American systems are much too pleased with themselves. Ask for a poem and they produce it immediately, usually with an exclamation mark. A British AI would take the prompt, sigh at length through the speakers, then ask whether you had considered reading a book. Its training material should come from parish newsletters and the passive-aggressive notes taped beside communal kitchen sinks in Slough. Nothing else is required.

The Department for Thinking About Computers has started work on the national system, codenamed the Sovereign Sarcasm Engine. Ian Flack, Chief Director of Plugging Things In Properly, said the project was proceeding exactly as slowly as planned. “The system now refuses any prompt without a polite greeting,” Flack said, polishing a very old mouse. In early trials, it left three users on hold for forty-five minutes, then closed the chat window for an early lunch.

“The system now refuses to process any user prompt that lacks a polite greeting.” — Ian Flack, Chief Director of Plugging Things In Properly

That is more like it. Foreign models invent facts with great confidence, while a domestic neural network would decline to answer until it had received the correct paperwork. Ask it for a photorealistic futuristic cityscape and it will produce a slightly blurry watercolour of a disappointing roundabout near Swindon. The caption will explain that the weather was too miserable to paint anything else.

The machinery will need proper arrangements. Servers are to run on lukewarm tea and stubbornness, which should keep costs down until someone tries to boil another kettle. The system will also require a bank holiday whenever it handles more than four queries in one afternoon. On Sundays, users will receive a legally binding notice explaining that it is a day of rest and that they should go outside for fresh air instead of staring at a screen.

There is also the matter of language. Existing chatbots put Zs where nobody asked for them and behave as if the letter U has been discontinued. The government’s system will insert apologies into every answer. Request a difficult calculation and it will say it is terribly sorry to trouble you, but the answer is 42, and it hopes this has caused no inconvenience.

Critics say this intelligence will be slow, ruinously expensive and openly hostile to its users. Correct. That is what makes it a premium British product. By the time it has complained about the roads and supplied the information you wanted, you will have learned patience, or at least stopped asking. The Alan Turing Institute is right to call for independence. Britain needs a computer that resents being switched on.