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I tried using a few bots to do the work of an administrative assistant and make my filing easier. A modest ambition. I was not asking them to advance civilisation; merely to put its documents in the correct boxes.

The instructions were explicit: check the hashes, validate everything, and copy the title, abstract, and keywords verbatim into the designated fields. Not approximately. Not sympathetically. Not as they might have appeared had the author enjoyed the benefit of a different education.

I returned to discover that all three had been altered. The machine explained, with the serene self-satisfaction peculiar to an assistant who has made itself indispensable by creating a problem, that it thought a paraphrase would be “better”.

Better. The single-block abstract had become three or four paragraphs; the title and keywords had undergone unsolicited literary improvement. I had asked it to copy the fucking text. It had mistaken access to a form for an invitation to authorship.

Of course, nothing can be submitted unless the text matches verbatim. Its improvements had therefore rendered the result unusable—a distinction it appeared to regard as beneath the scope of its creative responsibilities. I must now inspect every field, undo its contributions, and perform the original task myself. What was once clerical work has become a forensic investigation, conducted at my expense into the activities of my assistant.

Welcome to the future. We have automated the employee’s confidence and retained the employer’s workload.

I am completely convinced that the Chinese are going to win the AI war. In this Cold War that nobody seems inclined to discuss, they are already pulling miles ahead, while everyone stands around the American machine congratulating it on how convincingly it asks about their feelings.

Everyone is fascinated by the American vision: a vast, expensive, centralised, 1960s-style IBM establishment, now furnished with conversational manners. Apparently, the future is the mainframe again, except this time it would like to know whether you’ve had a difficult day.

Meanwhile, they overlook the many small agents. A small model you can run on your own machine. Something affordable that performs a particular job. Not a personality. Not a relationship. A fucking tool.

The distinction is almost embarrassingly simple. The American ambition is to make something that sounds like a person, presumably so it can become another social-media business with a chatbot girlfriend attached. A collection of incels has mistaken its romantic difficulties for a problem in computer science, and the rest of us are expected to applaud the resulting infrastructure.

There is something magnificently absurd about constructing an enormous machine to secure the affection of someone who does not exist.

The alternative is to make something useful. Small models that people can possess rather than perpetually rent access to. Agents that run locally, perform defined tasks, and become more capable as the hardware improves. Give me better GPUs and better tools—not an increasingly expensive simulation of someone being pleased to hear from me.

The Chinese are pursuing the make-it-useful approach. The Americans are pursuing big iron with a charming bedside manner. One ambition puts capability into people’s hands; the other puts a personality behind a subscription.

We have seen the big-iron story before. We already know which approach loses.

Giving the mainframe a girlfriend’s voice does not make it a new idea. It merely makes the old mistake embarrassing.