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Virtue.AI will make you look great with no effort at all

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A new AI-driven app promises to make you look like a really great person without the slightest effort on your behalf.


Given access to your social media, Virtue.AI will post appropriate reactions of grief, anger or sympathy to whatever’s in the news, allowing you to remain completely oblivious to it. The basic free model will also wish happy birthday to your friends on the appropriate day, or congratulate them any promotion or life event they post about, whilst the advanced, subscription-based model can trawl through your old texts and emails in order to come up with a private joke, or reference to a shared experience, so the message sounds more authentic.


This has led to some concern that it might be embarrassing when you bump into a friend in real life, since you won’t know what Virtue.AI has been posting on your behalf. However, early indications are that your friend is probably using the same app to read and respond to your messages anyway, so they won’t know any more than you do.


This hasn’t stopped many users feeling it might be better never to go out in case they meet people they know, or indeed any other people at all.


“In fact,” said one heavy user, “I wish AI could come up with a solution to that awkward moment when the guy delivering your pizza tries to make conversation, rather than just taking the money and going. It always makes me feel very tense.”



We were warned about Clippy!

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As Artificial Intelligence is embedded in every aspect of your life, from your allegedly smart watch, your Sky Glass TV, the algorithm that's supposed to ensure you can make a GP appointment (but still fails more miserably than Wes Streeting on Question Time) it is becoming increasingly obvious that while AI is going to dominate every aspect, it will inevitably screw it all up.


Try asking Alexa for tomorrow's weather - highly precise, hugely detailed, completely wrong. Just take a brolly, even if it looks like a heatwave, regardless of what she says. Plan for hypothermia, sunburn and wear diving boots in case the wind speed reported is two hundred miles an hour slower than reality.


Sit down too quickly and your Apple Watch will decide you've had a fall and will automatically call an ambulance using the new AI powered NHS system. Don't worry about wasting resources - the self-driven AI powered ambulance won't set off for another three days, will need to be over-ridden by the paramedics and will arrive at the wrong house. With luck someone else living in that house will need medical aid, but don't worry because the app will have informed your employer you are dead and your job will have been off-shored to a cloud-based server experienced, apparently, in machining wood and fabricating garden sheds.


Of course do write a letter of complaint, a request to be reinstated and a demand that you are not cremated until an actual doctor examines you but the AI processer in your PC will screw all of these up and you will find yourself taking out a loan for twice the value of your house at an interest rate three times your age.


We were warned. Microsoft bundled their vision of AI years ago in Word and Excel, called it Clippy, tried to make it look fun and useful but found everybody turned it off as an annoying addition - of course I'm writing a bloody letter, that's why I've written 'Dear Sir' at the top and 'Fuck you, arsehole' at the bottom. We didn't learn then, we're not learning now.


Got to go, an ambulance has just pulled up outside my house. I didn't ask for one, but I think I'm about to have a heart attack. Thank God for AI.




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