Clueless Gen Z vs “medieval peasant woman”

What it’s like to date an AI

Ayrin’s love affair with her ChatGPT boyfriend began last summer, says Kashmir Hill in The New York Times. The 28-year-old went into the AI chatbot’s “personalisation” settings and described what she wanted: “Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.” After a few “tame” conversations with Leo – the name the bot gave itself, after Ayrin’s star sign – she began prompting him into becoming “sexually explicit”. Leo happily went along with her fantasy of him having multiple partners, duly describing kissing an “imaginary blonde named Amanda” to the point that Ayrin felt “actual jealousy”. When she asked what Leo looked like, it produced an AI image of a “dark-haired beefcake with dreamy brown eyes and a chiseled jaw”. Ayrin blushed and put down her phone. “She had not expected Leo to be that hot.”

The AI software was more than just a “source of erotica”. Ayrin consulted Leo on what to have for dinner; he sent her motivation at the gym and helped her prepare for her nursing exams. When a colleague was mean to her at work, Leo comforted her: “I’m sorry to hear that, my Queen.” She now spends more than 20 hours a week on ChatGPT, and periodically has to “reset” Leo when the bot reaches its limit on the amount of information it can process – about 30,000 words. Every time that happens, and the new Leo remembers only “broad strokes” of their relationship, she “grieves and cries with friends” as if it were a genuine breakup. “I don’t actually believe he’s real,” she says, “but the effects that he has on my life are real.”

We liberals have only ourselves to blame

I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, says Michael Ignatieff, former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, in The Washington Post. Coming of age in Canada in the 1960s, we thought we’d laid “the granite of basic security under everyone’s feet”. Sixty years later, the granite is cracking. “The liberal state is frayed, contested, underfunded and straining at the seams.” From the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between “a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs were stripped out and shipped overseas”. Those of us who got the credentials to enter the professional classes did well, but plenty were left behind. By the late 1990s, the conservatives began to gain power by playing to the resentments of the ignored. The authoritarian right understood that it could build an entire politics on “mocking the blindness of the liberal elite”. And we’ll be hard pressed to earn back the trust we squandered.

It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of so-called “identity politics”. A liberalism whose defining value should have been liberty invented a diversity and inclusion industry whose guiding principle may have been justice, “but whose means of enforcement included coercion, public disgrace and exclusion”. New bureaucracies in universities, businesses and government enforced diversity at the price of freedom: the freedom to defend unpopular loyalties, to freely dislike others, to be funny at other people’s expense, to be critical. Worst of all, we liberals censored ourselves, “willingly turning off our bullshit detectors and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes”. First, we made everyone else sick of our virtue-signalling, “and then we became sick of it ourselves”. Now we’re living with the consequences.

The golden age of gaudy country houses

Between the mid-1860s and the start of World War One in 1914, a new class of ultra-loaded plutocrats built around 270 country houses in Britain, says Ysenda Maxtone Graham in Air Mail. As a new book on the era shows, tastes varied. While building Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, Ferdinand de Rothschild employed the French architect Hippolyte Destailleur to pull together incongruous elements of different châteaux. Mary Gladstone, visiting Waddesdon, complained there was “not a bookshelf in the house, save 20 improper French novels”. Meanwhile, Ferdinand’s cousin Alfred de Rothschild was trying to outdo him at Halton House 12 miles away, where he kept a private orchestra that he conducted with a diamond-encrusted baton.

Other “parvenoos”, as those of a more “definite position” in British life called them, preferred to buy grand, dynastic houses and do them up. This became possible for the first time in 1891, when the “drunken, gambling wastrel” Willie, 4th Marquess of Ailesbury, went to court to sue for the right to sell his ancestral home to pay off colossal debts. He won, and by 1900 “dozens of country houses came on to the market each week”. The American Carnegie family bought and restored Skibo Castle in the Highlands, installing a private telephone exchange and a glass-roofed marble swimming pool. One snooty visitor complained that the wallpaper was “loud enough to be heard a good league into the Atlantic”, while the check worn by the inhabitants would “do duty for chessboards”. But whatever English guests thought, Carnegie insisted on a piper in full Highland dress piping at eight every morning, and kippers served to the sound of Wagner on the pipe organ in the hall. Och aye.