A new government AI assistant is a huge PR blunder – because it is based on a fictional double-talker who is notorious for his inability to give a straight answer.

In other words: how is giving civil servants an artificial intelligence based on Sir Humphrey Appleby (played with aplomb by the late Nigel Hawthorne in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister) going to make it easier to get their job done?

Suppose they have to deal with the press on a matter of open government and they ask Humphrey-bot. What do you think he’ll say?

“He who would keep a secret must keep it a secret that he hath a secret to keep.”

Suppose they are asked to clarify an issue regarding legislation. What will be Humphrey-bot’s advice?

“Clarification is not to clarify things. It is to put one’s self in the clear.”

And suppose they wanted a definitive answer on a precisely-defined question?

“Well… if you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one time with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn’t very much in it one way or the other. As far as one can see, at this stage.”

And I’m not the only one who thinks so!

The BBC’s article on the new AI quotes Tim Flagg, chief operating officer of trade body UKAI, who said the name risked “undermining” the government’s mission to embrace the new Artificial Intelligence technology:

“Humphrey for me is a name which is very associated with the Machiavellian character from Yes, Minister,” says Mr Flagg from UKAI, which represents the AI sector.

“That immediately makes people who aren’t in that central Whitehall office think that this is something which is not going to be empowering and not going to be helping them.”

The article states that

Most of the tools in the Humphrey suite are generative AI models – in this case, technology which takes large amounts of information and summarises it in a more digestible format – to be used by the civil service.

But if it actually did summarise information in a way that was more easy to understand, then it would not be true to its namesake – would it?

This is typical of Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

It has set out to reassure the public that a technological advance will help us all – only to undermine its own efforts with a shocking – if unintentionally amusing – PR blunder.

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