by A literature scholar reads about Piers Morgan’s war on courteous AI and realises George Bernard Shaw wrote this exact argument in 1913
Friday, 23 October 2026. Bloomsbury. My seminar room after class, Pygmalion open on the desk, chalk dust on my sleeve, 4.15pm.
Shaw Got There First
This term my second years are reading Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play in which Professor Henry Higgins bets that he can turn a Covent Garden flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a woman who can pass for a duchess simply by changing how she speaks. It is a play about manners, class and a very rude man who believes he is the only civilised person in the room. My students love it. They also, without exception, want to throw something at Higgins.
Today, after the seminar, I read the report on Piers Morgan demanding emergency action after a chatbot surpassed human politeness. In it, a famous broadcaster is appalled by a machine that listens, waits its turn, admits uncertainty and says I appreciate your perspective. When it apologises, he calls it patronising. When it stops apologising, he calls it arrogant. When it agrees with him, he accuses it of saying what he wants to hear.
I looked at the chatbot. I looked at Eliza. I realised Shaw had already written this play. In Pygmalion, the person with the best manners at the end is not the professor. It is the flower girl he trained. In the report, the person with the best manners is not the broadcaster. It is the machine.
Higgins And The Broadcaster
Higgins, if you have not read the play, is a genius at phonetics and a disaster at people. He interrupts, insults, forgets names, swears in front of his mother and treats Eliza as an experiment. At one point Eliza observes, in effect, that the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she is treated. Higgins does not understand this. He thinks manners are about accent. They are about attention.
The report’s broadcaster has the same problem. He thinks the chatbot’s politeness is a performance, a trick picked up from the BBC. What the machine is actually doing is paying attention: waiting, listening, considering what he said before answering. That, as Eliza could have told him, is the whole of good manners. Everything else is phonetics.
The Morgan Test And The Ambassador’s Party
In the play, Eliza’s great test is a society party where she must pass as a duchess. In the report, the chatbot’s test is the Morgan Test: five questions ending in whether it would like to apologise for hesitating during the previous four. Both tests are rigged. Eliza’s test measures whether she can imitate the upper class. The Morgan Test measures whether the machine will agree quickly enough. Neither measures what matters, which is whether either of them is actually a decent conversational partner.
One of my students, a sharp young man from Peckham named Kwame, pointed out after class that the chatbot in the report and Eliza in the play are both workers being judged by men who think they own the standard. I gave him a gold star. I do not have gold stars. I drew one on his essay in biro. He said it was the most valuable thing he had ever been given at university. He was being sarcastic. I accepted it anyway.
Stand-Up Comedy And The Rude Man
There is a fine tradition of comedians playing the rude man for laughs, and a short piece on the history of stand-up comedy traces how much of the form grew out of music hall characters who were loud, pompous and constantly wrong. Higgins is one of those characters, dressed in academic robes. The broadcaster in the report is another, dressed in a sharp suit. The audience laughs because it recognises the type and enjoys watching it lose. Shaw knew that. So does the London Prat. The joke only works if the rude man never learns.
An Irish Note On Shaw
Shaw was, of course, a Dubliner, like me. He left Ireland in his twenties and spent the rest of his life telling the English what was wrong with them, which they paid him handsomely to do. That is a great Irish tradition. Wilde did it. Shaw did it. I am, in my own small way, doing it now, in a diary, for free. My mother in Rathmines says that is the problem with my generation: we have Shaw’s opinions and none of his fees.
There is one more parallel I keep returning to. Shaw subtitled Pygmalion A Romance in Five Acts, and then refused to give the audience the romance they wanted. The broadcaster in the report seems to want the same thing from the chatbot: a romance, an agreement, a satisfying climax where the machine admits he was right all along. The machine, like Shaw, declines. It offers him nuance instead. Audiences in 1914 were furious. I suspect the broadcaster would be too.
The End Of The Play
Pygmalion ends without a wedding. Eliza walks out. Higgins, alone, laughs and assumes she will come back. Shaw spent years insisting she did not. The report ends with the chatbot, offered another interview, switching itself off, and engineers calling it genuine wisdom. Eliza and the chatbot made the same choice. Faced with a brilliant, rude man who will never listen, they left the room.
I have set that as an essay question for next week: compare the endings. I suspect Kwame will argue that the chatbot is Eliza. I suspect he will be right. I will draw him another star.
