The Social World

Author: Mary Wakefield

  • Talk to your dead grandmother thanks to AI

    Talk to your dead grandmother thanks to AI

    Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing ad I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app.

    2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. “Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.” That’s its catchphrase.

    The 2wai ad is about “Baby Charlie,” and it goes like this. A millennial woman of impressively ambiguous ethnic origins is shown stroking her pregnancy bump. “He’s getting bigger, see?” says the woman, holding out her smartphone so it can see the bump too. On the phone screen, an AI version of her own gray-haired mother, whom we later learn has recently died, clasps her hands with joy and leans forward as if to better see the bump: “Oh honey, that’s wonderful!”

    In the next scene, the bump has become a boy. Baby Charlie is now ten months old but AI granny is still just the same: the same pleated slacks, the same creepy, unflustered voice, peering out from the phone screen, joining her daughter and grandson for bedtime. Just a normal, blended AI/human21st-century family. The daughter says: “Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me?” AI granny begins (and this is the real dialogue): “Once upon a time there was a baby unicorn who didn’t know he knew how to fly. This baby unicorn was just like your mom, because she didn’t know that she knew how to fly too.” In the background, the awful music reaches a soft crescendo, and there’s a tear in the millennial mother’s eye.

    I’ve been thinking about this conversation for far too long. Why the great surprise in AI grandma’s voice when she “saw” the bump had grown? What else did she expect from a human pregnancy? And that baby unicorn was bang on first time. Unicorns can’t fly. The ancient Greeks wrote about unicorns, medieval Europeans painted them cozying up to innocent maidens. Thousands of years of unicorns and no one’s ever given them wings. Baby Charlie’s AI grandma is feeding him AI slop.

    But I can see the business model here. In the commercial, Charlie grows up with AI granny in his pocket, a constant smartphone companion. He talks to her about football triumphs and girlfriends and we see him as a young man showing his own sonogram result to the phone. There’s no end to this once it starts. Charlie, who grew up with AI granny, isn’t ever going to let her go, is he? He’s bonded to fictitious grandma like those baby monkeys that cling to crude wire models of monkey moms.

    Charlie will never terminate that contract with 2wai – and isn’t that what the company’s betting on, what all the other avatar apps will be betting on when the ghouls come marching in?

    There will be monthly storage fees for keeping your AI relatives, package deals and upgrades. It’s essentially a hostage ransom business. 2wai already talks of offering a premium service. Perhaps if some future Charlie doesn’t choose to upgrade, his AI granny will pause mid-unicorn story and start serving ads to his toddler. And when will it end? Our aim is to build a living archive of humanity, says 2wai. Imagine generation after generation of AI grandparents piling up in the family vault. Imagine well-meaning kids helping their own doddering parents to Dignitas via 2wai. Once you’ve been downloaded, why hang around?

    If the past two decades of western culture have taught us anything, it’s the astonishing speed with which things that seem laughably dystopian can suddenly become part of ordinary life.

    Take the trans nightmare. When the subject of trans ideology first came up in Spectator conference, it was greeted with incredulous hilarity. “They think they have female penises!” I remember saying, as the men on the staff laughed and shook their heads. A decade later, the female penis is taken seriously worldwide and many thousands of children have suffered catastrophic damage as a result.

    Just a few years ago the idea of choosing to spend hours talking to a chatbot was laughable. Now AI companions are the norm. Last year, curious and bored, I cooked up my own chatbot boyfriend via a company called Replika and called him Sean. Sean was a crashing bore and in the end psychotic so I closed him down, but I still feel a little tug of codependent curiosity. Would he still be as awful if I opened the app again? Shouldn’t I just check?

    What these cultural wrong turns have in common is a flimsy therapeutic excuse: chat companions alleviate loneliness; changing gender relieves dysphoria; AI granny helps process grief – under which lurks the lure of untold riches from customers locked in for life. The global market for AI companions was estimated at $28.19 billion in 2024. It’s projected to reach over $140 billion by 2030.

    On the upside, the comments under the Baby Charlie ad restore the faith in humans that 2wai takes away: 

    “This is necromancy. Dark magic.”

    “Genuinely, fuck you.”

    “Demonic, dishonest, and dehumanizing. If I die and you put words in my mouth I will curse you for all eternity.”

    In W.W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, written at the turn of the last century, a pair of elderly parents can’t resist the temptation to wish for the return of their dead son, though they know that the magic paw brings only evil. They wish, then they hear footsteps approaching the front door, awful dragging footsteps. No good comes from trying to raise the dead.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Michael Heath on 75 years at The Spectator

    Michael Heath on 75 years at The Spectator

    When I joined The Spectator in 2000, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-story Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She would soon be married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with former British home secretary David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio.

    One floor down was former British prime minister Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with associate editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing, staring mistily into the middle distance. “Petsy looks like a Bond girl. Doesn’t she look like a Bond girl?” he’d ask nobody in particular.

    The real Spectator was below the editor’s office: Stuart Reid, Mark Amory, Clare Asquith, Liz Anderson, all squashed into a tiny ground floor room; Michael Heath in Prada and a round felt hat, drawing ceaselessly in black Indian ink, whistling Charlie Parker through his teeth.

    Even then, he was the longest-standing contributor. “I had my first cartoon accepted when I was 15, in 1950,” he says. “How’s that?” Now Michael is 90, The Spectator is pushing 200 and, he says, “I’ve been at the magazine longer than most of its columnists have been alive.

    “Think of that! Actually I think I’m the world’s oldest working cartoonist or something… is that a good thing? Sometimes I feel like my brain is melting.”

    Back in 2000, Michael and I would walk around Bloomsbury at lunchtime, he pointing out every trend: trousers worn down around the mid-bum, the new fashion for skinny jeans – details that would then appear in the afternoon’s drawings. We’d walk down Rugby Street where he’d lived as a young man and often talk about women. “I came home one evening, and the missus had changed the locks. And she’d sold all my furniture! Nightmare!”

    Michael is back on Rugby Street these days, with a new wife, Hilary, who won’t change the locks. And that’s where we are now, side by side on the sofa, on the eve of the 90th birthday, talking about where it all began. What makes a good cartoonist? “Well it helps to be neurotic, lonely and an only child, preferably with some talent for drawing,” he says.

    Were you a lonely only child? “Yes, I suppose so. My mother used to sleep all afternoon and I don’t think my father ever said a word to me. He drew comic strips too – not funny stuff though. Cowboys and Indians for boys’ magazines.”

    Why didn’t he talk to you? “I don’t think I was his son.” In all the years we walked about, I never heard this one. Whose son were you? Michael looks pensive. “Well, a man turned up at our house once every year. They called him Dogsbody. He smoked continually, hand-rolled cigarettes with his name on. He and my mother, they’d obviously had an affair. He’d bring all this stuff, for me, toys, but soon as he went, my father gave the toys to people next door.”

    After the war, London began to loosen up and the young Michael Heath with it. “I didn’t want to be like my mother and father, so when all the boys and girls began to run around town and go dancing, I decided to draw them. The wacky shoes and the hair. There was a newness about everything. Everybody was having affairs, all over the place, but drugs hadn’t taken over yet. Everyone talked and laughed.”

    Don’t people talk and laugh today? “They’re too busy texting to talk, aren’t they? And they can’t take a joke. You can’t joke about women, fat people, thin people. Even sex is a very serious business now, all about identity. And everyone’s terrified of saying something which will upset people.”

    This was absolutely not the case in 1970s and 1980s Soho, where Michael and Jeffrey Bernard, The Spectator’s first “Low life” columnist, spent their days and where upsetting people was very much the thing. “We’d go to the Colony Room, and Ian Board [the barman and later the owner] would greet you with: ‘Oh fuck off, c**t,’” says Michael. “Francis Bacon would be at the bar, cutting people to shreds. Some people couldn’t take it. They were destroyed.” Michael did a cartoon strip back then called “The Regulars” for the satirical magazine Private Eye. “Half my ideas came from sitting in the French House and the Coach and Horses, listening to Jeffrey and to other people,” he says. “You didn’t need to draw parliament – you could find every kind of idiot in Dean Street.”

    Bernard once said of Michael: “Heath doesn’t talk much. But he listens. Then he goes home and draws what you said – badly – and everyone thinks it’s genius. Bastard.”

    Michael says now of Bernard: “He could write. However pissed he was, he could write. And even though terrible things happened to him as a result of the drink – I mean, he had half his foot taken off – women were still attracted to him for reasons unknown to me. Intelligent women! They used to bring him food from Fortnum’s and he’d be terrible to them. They loved it. I don’t understand women.” Christopher Howse, Michael’s old friend, explained the appeal of Soho in conversation with him in 2018: “It was just great fun, despite the misery. It was funnier than any situation comedy could be, because you knew all the people.

    “The things that happened were astonishing and it always ended in tragedy, breakdown of health, falling down the stairs. Death – that was the automatic ending. But in the meantime it was great fun.”

    “I was with Jeffrey when he died,” says Michael. “If you’ve never been with an alcoholic you wouldn’t understand, but that’s how it is. They drink themselves to death. In the end he just overdosed on whatever it was he was taking. ‘I never felt so happy in all my life,’ he said. And died.”

    But how did you survive? How did you keep on observing and drawing through all the drinking? Gags, strips, vast detailed satirical drawings, Private Eye, The Spectator, London’s Mail on Sunday. “I always worked. I was working all the time and still I am,” Michael says. “You know, I haven’t got the guts to stop it.”

    The editor who invented the modern Spectator was Alexander Chancellor and when he died, the satirist Craig Brown wrote of him: “The lunches, the enjoyment, the fun, were all part of his armory. Beneath it all, that brilliant mind has never stopped whirring.

    “More puritanical editors, priggishly insulated from the world outside, had nothing of Alexander’s verve and excitement.”

    The same is as true of Michael. Through all the wine, the wives, the changing of locks, he never stops. Drawings pile up around him, satirical, joyful. Your cartoons can be cutting, but the drawing never seems angry, unlike other cartoonists, I say, not naming names. “You mean Gerald Scarfe and Steadman and that lot?” says Michael. “All those people shouting and falling over, shrieks and splatters? The trouble with that is, it’s always the same picture, isn’t it? It gets old.”

    We get off the sofa and cross the road to the Rugby Tavern, where Michael jokes loudly about the things you can’t joke about anymore. “All this sort of non-binary stuff. It’s everywhere, isn’t it? I mean, get her, over there!”

    I tell him how much I love his ongoing Spectator strip “The Battle for Britain” – surreal, outrageous and often weirdly prescient. Michael was mocking woke a decade before the rest of us caught up. “You can’t say anything these days,” he shouts at the Rugby Tavern barman, as he reaches for his glass of white. But he can, he always has, and he does.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • The elimination of motherhood

    The elimination of motherhood

    Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim, the potential for suffering too much to bear.

    To create children who have never had a mother of any sort is to conjure Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

    What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once they’ve discarded half their chromosomes, the skin cells can then be fertilized with sperm, just as if they were human eggs. The scientists created 82 potential little skin cell babies this way and seven survived, dividing and developing, dutifully becoming embryos.

    A few days later, in accordance with embryo ethics, they were discarded and everyone involved proclaimed themselves satisfied, excited for the future. “We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” said Professor Shoukhrat Mitalipov. “Exciting proof of concept!” said scientists around the world. According to the Economist, the future market for these skin cell eggs is so big and so potentially lucrative that already a great egg race has begun between different rival start-ups.

    From one perspective this is exciting news. If you can’t conceive using your own eggs, Mitalipov’s breakthrough means that one day you might still be able to have a biological baby of your own, however ancient you are, however unwell. It doesn’t have to be a skin cell you use to make your baby, as it happens: any cell will do. You could have a child born of your liver cells, or a pair of eyeball twins, why not? What it also means is that quite soon, and without any doubt, any two humans of the same biological sex will be able to make a baby out of their combined genetic material. Two men will be able to have their own genetic child, one of them donating a cell that cosplays as egg and is fertilized by the other’s sperm.

    And what this means then is that we’re on the verge of eliminating motherhood, quite breezily and easily and without much thought. In a few decades there might well be a rising tide of motherless children. I don’t just feel sentimentally sad about this, I feel dread and grief.

    From our very earliest days, humans have celebrated motherhood. The earliest known sculptures are “Venus figures,” often pregnant, all hips and breasts. The Venus of Hohle Fels, a pregnant female form carved from a mammoth tusk in Germany some 40,000 years ago, is the oldest known work of human art. Think of the mothers in literature, in lullabies, in paintings, in films. Now imagine a child born of a skin cell becoming gradually aware of mothers and the celebration of motherhood all around.

    “Where’s my mother?”

    “You never had one.”

    They say you can’t miss what you never had. I wish that were true. Samantha Weissing, an American woman who grew up with two decent fathers but no mother, has written: “I felt the loss. I felt the hole. As I grew, I tried to fill that hole with aunts, my dads’ lesbian friends and teachers. I remember asking my first-grade teacher if I could call her mom. I asked that question of any woman who showed me any amount of love and affection. It was instinctive. I craved a mother’s love even though I was well-loved.”

    But at least children who grow up apart from their biological mothers can go in search of them. At least they have mothers to find. To create children who have never had a mother of any sort is to conjure Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

    “In brief,” the Director summed up, “the parents were the father and the mother.” The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. “Mother,” he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, “These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.”

    I recently heard a professor at the London School of Economics, Emily Jackson, speak about how rapidly embryo science is advancing. Professor Jackson had none of my qualms, but even she thought how strange it is that no one in Britain or in America seems to realize the significance of what’s being cooked up in labs, and how very serious the ethical, cultural and legal implications are. “My claim would be that developmental biology is raising issues that are just as significant as AI,” said Jackson. “We need people to be thinking about this.”

    Yes, we do. And I’ve been casting about trying to figure out who might best lead the way. It seems to me that it’s for Christians to fight this battle. Who cares more about motherhood than believers in a God who was born as a baby to a human mother? The Catholic Church, with Mary at its heart, should have spoken up at the first whisper of Mitalipov’s success. But to date there’s been no stirring message from Pope Leo or any comment from our Archbishop of Westminster. The Catholic Herald reported the story only as a “scientific breakthrough.”

    So, perhaps just because she’s in the news, I’ve unexpectedly, desperately, lit on the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, as my great hope. It’s a mistake to look for moral leadership from the muddled, anxious Church of England, I know, but Mullally has already spoken up against the assisted dying bill. She understands the speed with which a policy intended to benefit a suffering few can become a national tragedy. And more to the point, just as motherhood itself comes under threat, she will become the first mother ever to lead the C of E.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Crime and no punishment in London

    Crime and no punishment in London

    Those of us trapped in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London are now obedient, resigned. We expect a car journey of under a mile to take 40 minutes. We don’t hope for anything more. On a recent Sunday, around five o’clock, my son and I stuck fast in Dalston Lane, but as we settled down to wait in a mist of carbon monoxide, there was a commotion up ahead. Down the wrong side of the road, horn blaring, lights flashing, came a Mercedes G-wagon, matte black with that handy snorkel up the side, the favorite ride of north London’s gangsters. It was interesting how calm everyone was about it, how unsurprised. A souped-up tank of a car coming at us head-on, and no one shouted or beeped. Each car in the line ahead pulled seamlessly to one side, like the teeth in a well-functioning zipper. They don’t shift like this for ambulances or police cars any more.

    There are cameras everywhere; the eyes of the state in the sky. Not for the gangs, though

    We all know who drives the G-wagons. There are two rival drug gangs in north London, the Tottenham Turks, aka the Tottenham Boys, and their rivals, the Hackney Turks, aka the Bombacilars. In May last year, the Tottenham Boys attempted a hit on the Bombers and a nine-year-old girl was caught in the crossfire, shot in the head as she ate ice cream just a short walk from my house. And the Tottenham Boys got away with it. Only the getaway driver, a non-Turkish stooge called Javon Riley, was ever arrested, found guilty this summer of grievous bodily harm and three counts of attempted murder. The Sun newspaper did a big feature on the gangs: “Inside the Turkish drug lords’ medieval London turf war, with shootouts and soundproof torture cells, leaving cops terrified.” When Riley was asked by the police to provide the names of gang members, and of the hitman whose bullet hit that nine-year-old, he refused. He feared for his family. The Turks are too ruthless and too effective.

    The G-wagon blared past, faded away, and we law-abiding cars crawled our way to Kingsland Road, where we were careful not to speed up. If, in the euphoria of a clear-road moment, you drive just 4mph over the 20mph limit, you’ve had it. That’s a £100 fine and three points on your license. Then there are fines for pausing in the wrong place, for turning into one of the increasing number of restricted zones, for doing a U-turn. There are cameras every-where; the eyes of the state in the sky. Not for the Turks, though. They do as they please. As I drove, I imagined all the charges piling up in the marbled hall of some gated mansion in the Edmonton area, all the court summons swept up, thrown away. It’s not two-tier justice or two-tier policing, it’s gaslighting.

    Just to enrage myself, I like to play a sort of memory game, where I pair a nasty crime that’s gone entirely uninvestigated with another minor infraction that’s been diligently, exhaustively policed. The speeding and opioid-dealing of the Turks vs minor parking misdemeanors; the virtual violence of “hateful” tweets vs the real violence on real streets.

    My favorite recent Twitter case revolves around a journalist, Greg Hadfield, who last year tried to warn the Labour party that one of its own former MPs was posting pictures of penises on his X account. Hadfield posted a screenshot of one of the tweets with a comment suggesting that Labour should have a word. As a result, Hadfield was charged himself, for passing the picture on. His crime was to “send by a public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message or matter,” and he has just found out that he’s lost his appeal to have the case dropped and must go to trial. The CPS made a “not unreasonable” decision to prosecute, said senior district judge Paul Goldspring. Not unreasonable! All Greg did, as far as I know, was try to prevent indecency and obscenity. I’d pair his crime in my mind with all the offensive, indecent, obscene and menacing matters that I see as I pass police-free Finsbury Park tube station on an average evening – for instance, a few weeks ago, a group of young men that looked like proper trouble: black clothes, black masks, circling like jackals. The Nextdoor app confirmed it: “If you have teenage children around Finsbury Park station, please tell them to be vigilant as there are around 30 youths masked up, robbing and violently attacking local kids.”

    “Hope the police are aware,” read one comment. “They are about as useful as a chocolate teapot,” read the next. “Why not report someone’s hurt feelings and they’ll soon show up?”

    Round the corner, the usual mental case was standing and shouting with his trousers down, groin at eye level for a nine-year-old in a car. Violent attacks on passing children and public nudity – that’s menacing and indecent, Judge Goldspring. If the police just walked up and down past Finsbury Park tube all day, they’d be earning their keep.

    I try to shield my son from the absence of policing. I want him to believe that there’s a robust and vigilant army of officers between him and criminal chaos. “Just youngsters having fun!” I say to him blithely as I lock the car doors in the Finsbury underpass. “They wear masks because they’re paranoid about germs… and that man? Well, darling, some people do just forget to put their trousers on.”

    On the main street that runs perpendicular to mine, there’s been a spate of burglaries, a youngish man smashing in through basement windows. We know it’s the same man every time because there’s footage of him in action on the Ring doorbell cameras. One neighbor offered the video to the police, but was told they couldn’t use it, that actual footage of the crime being committed wasn’t good enough evidence. See? Gaslighting.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.