Londoner’s Diary
He may be one of the greatest living satirists, but Armando Iannucci is not above fighting with a chatbot. The creator of The Thick of It told the crowd at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Clerkenwell that he had “just picked an argument with Grok,” the AI assistant on Elon Musk’s X. “It reminds me of a quite good – but not the ultimate winner – Apprentice candidate,” he said. Grok had mistakenly identified an image as a film still from The Death of Stalin, to which Iannucci responded “Bollocks!”. The pair had a sparring match before Iannucci told Grok that it was a “gullible knobhead” and signed off. “I stopped doing this because I thought, I’ve probably destroyed the economy of about five countries just from the energy used,” he said.
Iannucci was on stage with Christopher Wylie (of Cambridge Analytica whisteblower fame) to discuss whether creativity can save us from the threats of AI, autocracy and other such delights. The pair concluded that the solution was for the Nooch to write a show satirising the tech broligarchs of Silicon Valley like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The one stumbling block, Iannucci noted, was that “most studios and quite a lot of the streamers are owned by the ‘garchs… we’ll have to crowdfund it.”
Never knowingly undersold
Meanwhile, is John Lewis following in M&S’s footsteps to become – whisper it – cool? The department store has collaborated with Labrum London to release its first menswear collection in 10 years. Designer Foday Dumbaya was joined by musicians Ella Eyre and Wilfred Cisse to launch the capsule at 180 Strand.
It was galas galore this week, with celebs were turning out their pockets for good causes. Liz Hurley and her son Damian joined the Spencer twins for a dinner to support Estee Lauder’s breast cancer campaign, while actors Julia Fox and Jodie Turner-Smith helped to raise over £1.5 million at amfAR’s inaugural London gala at the Chancery Rosewood hotel.
