What is everyone talking about this week: No verbiage, please, we're British

Sam Altman may control our future,’ The New Yorker opined two weeks ago. ‘But can we really trust him?’ That depends. The co-founder of OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, has faced a lot of heat for trying to upend, well, everything that we do: how we learn, how we work, even how we make love. So far, however, the technology has proved a poor amanuensis. When Reform candidate and alt-right agitator Matt Goodwin used ChatGPT to write his latest cultural critique, Suicide of a Nation, the factoids and fabricated quotes bought him a one-way ticket to a takedown on GB News.

In the workplace, most of us know better than to trust ChatGPT and have instead turned to Claude, a chatbot developed by Anthropic, for the odd bit of help. Claude has yet to beat The Reader’s Digest when it comes to gardening advice (Spectator, March 25), yet its horticultural acumen might improve as its parent company spends more time in Old Blighty. Anthropic is rumoured to be eyeing up the expansion of its UK operations this month after its founders fell foul of Donald Trump (they weren’t comfortable with giving the US military unfettered access to their product). Labour adores the idea: the Chancellor has been waxing lyrical about rebooting the economy with AI investments since 2024, a pledge that up until now seemed about as realistic as Oxford winning the men’s boat race.

As a forensic examiner of all things I don’t fully understand (journalist, noun), I scanned the careers section of Anthropic’s website to see what jobs are currently on offer. ‘Anthropic builds Claude,’ the copy begins, ‘AI designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless.’ Reassuring. ‘If you’re drawn to hard problems with real stakes, we’d like to meet you.’ This sounds exciting, although I wonder if the copywriters have considered the very hard problem posed by their job specs — an overdose of verbiage — with an equally real stake: my stomach. ‘As an EMEA Nonprofit Account Executive at Anthropic,’ reads one entry, ‘you’ll drive adoption of safe, frontier AI by securing strategic partnerships’ (as opposed to non-strategic partnerships?) and ‘leverage your consultative sales expertise to propel revenue growth’. Great use of ‘right click: thesaurus’, team!

It reminded me of a meme my Editor sent me recently, translating English into LinkedIn-ese: ‘I ate the sandwich’ becomes ‘Proud to announce that I’ve successfully identified and eliminated an unsecured lunch asset’. Anthropic is likely to find that this kind of verbal Kool-aid doesn’t go down well with the British; and that, outside of Palo Alto, plain English remains the best advert for any product. Claude, ironically, is a mercifully plain speaker (it’s what people like about it), just as the smartest graduates this side of the pond tend to be. The fewer the buzzwords, the better.