I told Copilot to f**k off the other day. ‘F**k off, Copilot,’ I typed, without asterisks

I told Copilot to f**k off the other day. “F**k off, Copilot,” I typed, without asterisks. This was a mistake, and not just because I didn’t heed the warning of Anne, played so hilariously by Philippa Dunne in the BBC comedy Amandaland. Anne says her husband laughs at her for saying please and thank you to AI assistants. “But at least when the computers take over they might have me down as one of the good humans, and they might spare me. From the first cull, at least.”

I have now lost my opportunity to join the ranks of the good humans. In my defence, I was provoked. I opened up Microsoft Word and was greeted with this instruction, which incidentally contained no please or thank you: “Describe what you’d like to draft with Copilot.”

This incursion on my job, my domain, my function, my reason to get up in the morning, made me very angry. You might as well repossess my home now, Copilot, I thought. “F**k the f**k off,” I said out loud, Malcolm Tucker style. (I live alone.)

Later, as I was reading some press material for a Netflix show, another message popped up. “This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant,” it instructed.

I sighed and tried not to take it personally that some stupid software doesn’t understand that long documents – laden with precise details, exact quotes and things other people might miss – are what I want and need. Bullet points, each one written in the same deadening rhythm of AI-speak, are not.

Blathering tech giants are on a dual mission to generate reams of unreliable text, purportedly on our behalf, and reduce everything else to a bland summary. Don’t read this, don’t write that. We’re doing that for you now. No need to worry your pretty little heads about “thinking” or “choosing”. And if you do find the strength to rustle up your own email from the available words in your pathetic human vocabulary, here’s another pop-up to make you doubt your capacity to communicate: “Rewrite this paragraph with Copilot.”

This is perhaps becoming less obvious by the day, but journalists are not meant to use AI to either “draft” or “rewrite” anything. To do so contravenes the ethics inherent in the role and drains the joy from it too.

“Don’t vote for Christmas, turkeys,” the guidance goes. Okay, I won’t. And yet I increasingly fear the media is not immune to the phenomenon in which people sceptical about the claims made by AI vendors, and alarmed by their intentions, find they must keep that a secret and instead pretend to be “one of the good humans” to placate AI-enthusiast bosses.

“See, that is a big part of why I hate it. This forced inevitability,” Ava ( Hannah Einbinder ) tells the smarmy pusher of an AI tool called QuikScribbl in a final-season episode of Hacks written by Carolyn Lipka and Joe Mande.

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“People like you are always saying that it’s happening whether you like it or not. But you’re the ones making it happen, okay, and you could easily stop it if people could say that they didn’t want it, but you don’t want to give people a choice. So you just say the train is already on the tracks, and you don’t let people decide for themselves. I’m sorry, it is technological R-A-P-E.”

Later, the software guy is adamant that Deborah ( Jean Smart ) will use QuikScribbl to write her comedy routines. “But I want to write the jokes. I like doing the work,” she protests, explaining that she arrived at a particular punchline after “trying a million other versions of it” first.

“Every time that joke didn’t work, not only did I make it better, but it made me a comedian. Because to become one you have to do it and fail, and do it and fail over and over and over, until you figure out who you are.”

These two speeches burn with writers’ rage, but the flippant yet sinister name of the fictional software is genius alone. You’re not using your slow human brain for this, are you? Why not write faster with QuikScribbl?

I didn’t choose to install Copilot on my computer. I tried to uninstall it, but it still seems to be hovering there, taunting me. The solution might be to stop using Word like some kind of Gen Xer. Journalists joke online that only psychopaths write directly into the clunky content-management systems designed for newsrooms, but maybe that’s the simplest way of escaping QuikScribbl – sorry, Copilot.

Because, of course, the true error I made when I told it to f**k off was that I addressed it as if it’s a real being that can be wounded through engagement, not the advance tentacle of a pernicious industry we can hurt only by ignoring.