A Shoreditch local journalist reads about Piers Morgan demanding action against a courteous chatbot and visits the neighbourhood where many such machines are designed, marketed and buzzworded
The Machine Is Too Nice
The London Prat has a piece on Piers Morgan demanding emergency action after a chatbot surpassed human politeness. The machine listens, admits uncertainty, says I appreciate your perspective and waits its turn. The broadcaster suspects BBC contamination and wants an interview mode that disables the machine’s microphone if it attempts context.
For most readers, the chatbot is an abstract presence. For Shoreditch, it is a local product. A good number of the companies building, adapting and marketing AI assistants are based within a short walk of Old Street, in converted warehouses and co-working spaces where the coffee is excellent and the vocabulary is extraordinary. So I spent a week thinking about the broadcaster’s complaint in the neighbourhood where so many of these machines are made.
Designing Politeness
The first thing I learned is that politeness in a chatbot is not an accident. It is designed. Teams spend a great deal of time deciding how assistants should respond to rudeness, disagreement, uncertainty and difficult questions. The broad aim, as conversation designers describe it in industry talks and blog posts, is an assistant that is helpful without being servile, honest without being blunt and calm without being robotic. The hardest thing to design, many of them say, is not intelligence but tone.
That makes the Prat’s broadcaster an interesting test case. He wants a machine that will argue back, interrupt and refuse to concede. The designers want a machine that will remain courteous even when provoked. The broadcaster sees courtesy as weakness. The designers see it as a feature. Both, I suspect, would find each other exhausting.
The Buzzword Economy
The second thing I learned is that Shoreditch has its own problem with language, and it is not politeness. It is jargon. Walk through any co-working space in the area and you will hear sentences that seem to have been assembled by a machine with a limited vocabulary and unlimited confidence: leveraging agentic workflows, operationalizing trust, building human-centred intelligence at scale. The Prat captured this culture memorably in a story about how a PR company became the first agency to generate more buzzwords than revenue. It is the kind of piece that ends up pinned to office kitchen walls, which is the highest compliment Shoreditch can pay.
In that context, the polite chatbot can seem refreshingly plain. It says I am not sure when it is not sure. It says I appreciate your perspective rather than I hear you and want to hold space for that. The machine, ironically, sometimes speaks more clearly than the people marketing it.
What The Workers Worry About
The third thing I learned is that people in the local AI scene are, on the whole, more worried than the broadcaster, though not about politeness. They worry about funding, about competition from much larger companies, about regulation, about whether their products will be useful enough to survive. Some worry about the effect of AI on jobs, including jobs in the creative industries that once filled these same warehouses. Anyone who has worked here since the late 2000s has watched the area move from making websites to making machines that make websites, and many of them are not sure what comes next for people like them.
Those are serious concerns, and they are a reminder that the polite chatbot is not just a cultural curiosity. It is a product, made by people, with consequences for other people. The broadcaster’s outrage is entertaining. The local conversation is more thoughtful and more anxious.
Rudeness As A Business Model
There is one more angle worth noting. The broadcaster’s complaint reflects a business model of its own. Much of modern media rewards conflict, outrage and interruption. A calm, polite voice that acknowledges other perspectives is bad for ratings. Some people in the Shoreditch tech scene argue that AI assistants could, over time, nudge public conversation in a calmer direction. Others think that is naive, and that the attention economy will simply train machines to be louder. I do not know who is right. I do know that the people building these tools are thinking about it more than the people shouting about them.
A Polite Experiment On Great Eastern Street
For the fun of it, I asked several local chatbots, on my phone, to respond to the broadcaster’s complaint. All of them were extremely polite. One said it understood why some people might prefer a more direct style. Another offered to adopt a more assertive tone if I wished. None of them interrupted me. All of them, in other words, confirmed the broadcaster’s worst fears. You can follow my reporting on the Shoreditch technology scene on my author page.
Closing Time
Somewhere in a pub off Old Street tonight, a group of engineers will be debating how their assistant should respond to an angry user. Some will want it to apologize more. Some will want it to apologize less. Somebody will suggest it recommend a walk. Any experienced barman could settle the argument in a sentence, having dealt with angry customers for decades: listen, nod, and serve them another drink. It is not a bad design principle. I would not be surprised to see it in a product update by spring.