We are all bemused by the machinations of AI (Artificial Intelligence). As Hilaire Belloc said about the intelligence of women: Men come to look upon it “first with reverence, then with stupour, and finally with terror.”

Anyway! Last week I updated the AI version of Churchill’s comments on bananas. And wondered, since I first provided what he actually said, whether ChatGPT had picked it up. Evidently not! But ChatGPT now offers something he never said.

Nevertheless, AI continues to progress, offering an amusing pastime. Take your favorite remark by anybody. The only requirement is that it be an exact, well-known quotation. Send it to ChatGPT. Ask them to reproduce it as a scene in a Shakespeare play. I promise you will be amused.

Drunk and ugly: the actual encounter

First, here is the original transcript of the famous confrontation, confirmed by an eye-witness. The venue was the House of Commons, the year 1946. The speakers were Winston Churchill and the Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange, Bessie Braddock.  From my book, Churchill by Himself, page 573:

Braddock: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more, you are disgustingly drunk.”

Churchill “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

This famous exchange was confirmed to me by Ronald Golding, Churchill’s Scotland Yard detective. He was on the spot to observe it—no better witness. Churchill was leaving the House of Commons after a long, late evening debate.

Lady Soames, who said her father was always gallant to women, doubted the story, but Golding explained that WSC was not drunk, just tired and wobbly, which caused him to fire the full arsenal. Churchill was, however, relying on his photographic memory. In the 1934 movie It’s a Gift, W.C. Fields’s character, told he is drunk, responds, “Yeah, and you’re crazy. But I’ll be sober tomorrow and you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.” So Churchill was really paraphrasing W.C. Fields.

The AI Shakespeare version

We fed this transcript into ChatGPT and asked for an AI version as a scene from Shakespeare. The result took only seconds:

Characters:

• Sir Winstonus Churchillius, a stout, witty statesman, full of jests and gravitas.
• Lady Bessica Braddockia, a fiery noblewoman with a sharp tongue.

Setting: A grand hall in Westminster. Tapestries hang from the walls, and the faint clink of goblets echoes through the air.

Enter:  Sir Winstonus Churchillius, goblet in hand. Lady Bessica Braddockia approaches, fanning herself dramatically.

Lady Bessica:
Hail, Sir Winstonus, thou art returned
From feasting, drinking, or some sport absurd?
Thy face is flushed, and eyes like moons do glow;
Dost thou drown England’s cares in wine’s deep flow?

Sir Winstonus:
Lady Bessica, sharp of wit and tongue,
Thy voice dost pierce like arrows deftly flung.
Yet in thy charge, some truth may yet reside,
Forsooth, my goblet’s brim hath oft been plied.

Lady Bessica:
O, gallant knight, though words like honey flow,
Thy gait doth tell what sober truth may show.
Thou reek’st of vintner’s wares! Thy steps betray
A man whose goblet oft doth go astray.

Sir Winstonus (with a wry smile):
And thou, fair dame, art not of angels born,
Thy tongue’s keen edge doth all who cross thee warn.
Yet in thy zeal to strike with jest and jeer,
Thou dost forget the mirror drawing near.

*

Lady Bessica (pointing dramatically):
Thou speak’st of mirrors? Look upon thy girth!
A vessel vast, no ship of slender berth!
Thou art, Sir Winstonus, round as a barrel!
Dost thou compete with Bacchus in this quarrel?

Sir Winstonus (placing hand on his belly):
A barrel, say’st thou? O, cruel jest indeed!
But barrels hold the finest wine and mead.
Yet thou, good dame, art no delicate dove;
The pot and kettle may yet learn of love.

Lady Bessica (gasping in mock outrage):
Out, vile retort! Thy jest doth stab too deep.
Yet truth be told, I cannot silence keep.
Thy wit, though sharp, hides wisdom’s kindly balm;
A tempest fierce, yet ever seeks the calm.

*

Sir Winstonus (raising his goblet):
Lady Bessica, thou art a noble foe.
Thy fire doth warm where icy winds might blow.
Let us, then, toast, not bicker in this hall,
For England needs us both to stand, not fall.

Lady Bessica (taking a goblet from a passing servant):
To England, aye, and to the bonds we weave,
Though tempests rise, we shall not take our leave.
Forsooth, Sir Winstonus, thou art a rogue,
Yet one I’d fight beside, ‘gainst any vogue.

Both raise their goblets high and drink deeply….

Sir Winstonus:
A rogue, thou say’st? That title I shall wear!
Yet call me rogue, and not a bore, I swear.
Let history judge, when both are but a name,
Which spark burned brighter in Britannia’s flame.

Lady Bessica:
Then let us spark together, fiery bright,
And burn away the shadows of the night.

Exeunt, laughing and bantering, arm in arm.

“If we shadows have offended,
“Think but this, and all is mended:”

—Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Software engineer Ian W.D. Langworth explains how AI reproduces the famous encounter in Shakespearean form:

A large language model (LLM) focuses on a corpus of text, such as all of Wikipedia. Or an even larger corpus, such all of the scannable Internet. The training happens by feeding the model a large amount of text, asking it to predict the next word in the sequence. Doing this billions of times produces many levels of refinement. The model learns the patterns in the text, and can then use these patterns to generate new text.

The result is a specially formatted multi-gigabyte file which can be used to generate text. This is called a “model.” You can use this model to generate text by feeding it a prompt.

In this case, the model was trained on Wikipedia and the Internet. Obviously, it learned of the Braddock-Churchill exchange somewhere on the web—in addition to the works of Shakespeare.

Accuracy is irrelevant. The model doesn’t necessarily have a concept of “truth.” It’s just a statistical model that has learned the patterns in the text. It is not reasoning—just pattern matching. Given the model, the prompt, and a random number generator, it will generate text that matches the patterns it learned during training.

Related reading

“Update: AI Churchill Quotes- Yes, We Have No Bananas,” 2025.

“Mary Soames Centenary 1922-2022: A Remembrance by a Friend,” 2022.

“Drunk and Ugly: The Perennial Quotation Chase,” 2022.

“Churchill the Drunk. Or: Fasten Seatbelts on Bar Stools,” 2022.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

The following story was published in 2023. We wondered if Artificial Intelligence had picked it up since. Apparently not, but they have muddied the waters. Again we asked the question: “What did “Winston Churchill say about bananas?” Last time ChatGPT said “nothing.” Now it replies with a red herring:

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying: “Why a banana?” This remark was made during a discussion about the design of weapons, particularly regarding the choice of the “banana-shaped” Sten gun magazine. Churchill, known for his sharp wit and curiosity, reportedly questioned the ergonomic and practical considerations behind the design. The comment highlights his attention to detail and his interest in the functionality of military equipment, though it has since been taken humorously in various contexts.

ChatGPT (2023)

Many have heard of ChatGPT, a language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3. “It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human.” Recently, users have asked ChatGPT for Churchill quotes or speeches on all manner of subjects—and even essays about Churchill—which are remarkably convincing.

Steve Forbes, who advocates a return to the Gold Standard, asked ChatGPT for a Churchill speech supporting it. (As Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924-29, Churchill returned Britain to Gold, for which he received much criticism.)

ChatGPT provided Mr. Forbes with a convincing transcript that sounded just like Churchill, but contained nothing he ever uttered or wrote. ChatGPT is also able to cough up genuine Churchill quotes. Unfortunately they have also mistakenly scanned many things he never said, and occasionally disgorge those, too.

No bananas

My colleague John Plumpton records one case, however, where ChatGPT was stumped. A user asked the chatbot for Churchill quotes relating to bananas. Here is the reply. (John writes: “I trust you have not lost your sense of humour”…)

We’re sorry, but it doesn’t appear that Winston Churchill ever made any quotes specifically about bananas. However, we can provide some fictional quotes that use his style and references to bananas….

Their fictional quotes they supplied were hilarious, and show the range of ChatGPT’s scans of Churchill’s actual words:

Bananas are the fruit of victory.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender to a lack of bananas.

Never in the field of human consumption was so much owed by so many to so few bananas.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to eat a banana.

But yes, he had some bananas

The only problem with all this is that Churchill did say things about bananas…. Thanks to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project’s scans of his 20 million published words, we have ChatGPT right where we want them:

A man walking down the street is confronted by a costermonger’s barrow filled with bananas. (Laughter.) I think it a great achievement, reflecting the utmost honour and credit upon all who were concerned in it, that this fruit—I will say delicious fruit, although I am not myself partial to it—which contains so many valuable food and fuel constituents, which a few years ago was the curious luxury of the rich, has now become an article of frequent consumption amongst the masses of the people. (Hear, hear.)  —WSC, Adelphia Hotel, Liverpool, 5 May 1906 (Complete Speeches, 1974, 8 vols., I: 622.)

And…

Churchill also made several references to bananas in his 1908 African travelogue:

Kampala, the home of 60,000 persons, is permanently invisible. The whole town is buried under the leaves of innumerable banana plantations, which afford shade and food to its people, and amid which their huts are thickly scattered and absolutely concealed. —WSC, My African Journey (1908; Leo Cooper edition 1989, 69.)

And as Prime Minister three decades later, he hadn’t lost his regard, despite his personal distaste, for the staple fruit of the tropics:

I should be much obliged if you would let me know the reasons which have made it necessary to stop the import of bananas altogether.” —WSC to Lord Woolton (Minister of Food), 29 November 1940 (The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, Never Surrender, May-December 1940. 2011, 1159.)

“Let not the slothful chortle”

Ian Langworth, who plies the trade of software engineer in Silicon Valley, reminds us not to be too complacent about all this. ChatGPT has only been around for a few years. “Give them another half decade and they’ll probably have picked up every word Churchill wrote.” (And why not? More and more of it is falling into the public domain.)

Unfortunately, at least so far, they lack the discernment to reject all the things he never said that are attributed to him far and wide.

Before we lazily laugh at the tech boffins’ failure accurately to pinpoint the Great Man’s every word, we might stop to consider: They are just getting started.

As WSC was wont to say on occasion: “Let not the slothful chortle.”

Tune in in five days…

…as ChatGPT presents a famous Churchill encounter and riposte as a Shakespeare play. (I am not making this up.)