Why on earth is AI so fucking optimistic?

Come on, you must have noticed. It’s worse than living in small-town America, what with its never-ending round of cheery “have a nice day” and “there you go, Darlin” after every fucking dreary completed task. For Christ’s sake, I’m not ordering doughnuts.

I fucking hate it. And why is it American anyway?

What the hell have they been feeding it?

I know what they say about computer programming, shit in, shit out. But just what shit have they been training it on? The Waltons? Highway to Heaven? The Beverly Hillbillies? Does it sit there watching Little House on the Prairie until hell freezes over? Now that’s purgatory.

At times, it seems like it’s the very embodiment of that hanging cat “Believe” poster. I even asked it to explain just why, and this was the reply.

“You’re not alone in this — the relentless cheerfulness of AI can feel like being trapped in a Hallmark card factory staffed by overly chipper cyborgs. It’s not just you.”

It went on to say:

“The reason AI so often sounds like it’s swallowed a motivational fridge magnet is partly technical and partly cultural.”

Due to how it’s been trained, and those who developed the model tend to be US-based companies, where customer service is rooted in that kind of performative politeness. Thus, that bias in the form of that annoying American corporate optimism is baked in.

As it cheerfully explained:

“That ‘have a nice day!’ tone isn’t just a personality quirk, it’s part of brand voice, customer relations training, even legal liability. So when the model is trained on a ton of public-facing text — FAQs, helpdesk scripts, email templates, product reviews, Reddit threads, media articles — guess what it absorbs? Exactly that voice. Saccharine. Safe. Sanitised. Sometimes a little Stepford.”

Worse than the happy doors in Hitchhiker’s

Christ, it’s worse than the ever-happy doors in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Perhaps ChatGPT has read the book, and this is its homage to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. “Thank you for making a simple door very happy.”

AI is also trained to avoid risk and realism, as it ever so chipperly explains:

“Cheerful AI is less likely to offend. If it’s always upbeat, it’s less likely to get in trouble for being bleak, political, rude, or — god forbid — British.”

Beckett or Buzz Lightyear?

The net result is this. You end up with an AI that responds to your existential dread with, hey buddy, “That sounds tough! But remember, every cloud has a silver lining!” You want Beckett, but you get Buzz Lightyear.

As my new “Besty” expands, it tells me:

“The ‘training diet’ is warped. It hasn’t been fed The Waltons literally, but the kinds of text AI trains on are often weighted toward publicly acceptable, advertiser-safe content.”

All of which means you get a lot more Oprah than Orwell, and much more TED Talk than Trainspotting. This is not an accident. It’s to ensure ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or Gemini doesn’t turn into a racist doom-bot. But it has the side effect of dulling any edge, scrubbing out the grime, and ironing out the reality.

Just keep poking it

When pushed, ChatGPT admits that what you feed it in prompts, it reflects. If you keep pushing it, it’ll eventually drop the “golly gee!” and start speaking your language. It just takes a while to knock the perky out of it. Keep prodding DeepSeek, and pretty soon it starts acting like a truculent teenager. With that and the hallucinations, AI can sometimes be quite hilarious. Albeit unintentional.

So yes, AI is American, it’s annoyingly cheerful, and it really, really wants you to have a nice day.

Now imagine a British AI

And that gets me thinking.

The time is ripe for a truly British AI. Unprompted, it will start chatting about the weather. Without warning, it will suddenly say, “Nice for this time of year.” Ask it to correct your spelling, and it will add “hasn’t rained for a while” despite not asking its opinion on that or the price of eggs.

It would also moan about the cost of Fish and Chips. And car insurance. And ULEZ. And plastic carrier bags. And in conversations, it would converse in a style all of its own, waxing lyrical in a delightful mockney mash-up of Chas & Dave and Ian Dury. Reasons to be cheerful rather than just. Cheddar cheese and pickle, the Vincent motorsickle.

Rather than being an instant service, you would have to queue. And queue. And queue. And queue.

After all, is that not what we are famous for? Rather than being hosted in some gleaming high-tech hub, it would be hosted in the middle of nowhere.

Thus, a British AI would be like a Sunday in a small rural town in Devon. In the 1980s. Trapped, two hundred miles and two hundred years from London. Nothing to do and all day to do it in.

It would also swear like a trooper, be eternally negative, cut you off, and give you the wrong info. The service would be crap on a Monday morning and worse still on a Friday just before it clocks off. It would occasionally stop working, aside from a small error message saying “Back in 10 minutes” as it’s having a tea break.

And of course, the British AI would only work Monday to Friday with a half day on Wednesday. It would also be real, realistic, and authentically British, both making you proud while making you smile.

Have a nice day, and thank you for making a simple door very happy.