Warning – this is an April Fool’s joke! Haha!

April Fool’s, AI ‘writers’ and economists playing football; catch up on the latest City gossip in this week’s The Capitalist

Trigger warning: Joke!

The origins of April Fool’s Day have yet to be settled by historians, with competing theories for its emergence somewhere around the 1500s. One school patriotically traces it back to the Canterbury Tales, in which a rooster and a fox attempt to fool one another on the date, while another contests it began in France with Poisson d’Avril (April Fish), leading to a tradition today in which French children attempt to pin paper fish to adults’ backs before screaming “April fish!”. What is of infinitely more interest to The Capitalist, however, is the mystery that shrouds where exactly along that 600-year timeline PRs started getting involved too.

Indeed, this year, April Fools brand stunts have been in high supply, from the Royal Albert Hall launching a new Gen Z season, complete with ‘Doomscrolling in Concert’ and a ‘That’s actually quite problematic’ poster, to Count Binface announcing his defection to Reform. The art of a good April Fool’s, of course, is a crucial tad of believability, which brands achieved to various success. 

Tesco’s announcement of an Easter-sized boiled egg as part of its new high protein range: tick. Simmons’ announcement of its first hotel – a disco-ball drenched Soho spot, with overnight karaoke and 24/7 happy hour – less so, given its struggle to keep just its nightclubs going, let alone any new ventures. Meanwhile, given the state of the nation, The Capitalist is yet to determine whether Drake & Morgan’s new ‘Guinness terrace’ in Canary Wharf – complete with a ‘Black Velvet’ cocktail that blends the black stuff with Prosecco – is a joke or not. Which may be the reason other PRs took an altogether more direct approach, with The Capitalist receiving more than one email seemingly inspired by the French yelling tradition with subject line ‘April Fool’s: [insert tepid joke]’. You know what they say about punchlines that need explaining…

It’s not just annoying – it’s damn right insulting

Amid the ChatGPT age, sniffing out AI-written copy has become yet another chore added to The Capitalist’s already long list of editorial duties. But this week, the need for such diligence was once again validated, with The Capitalist faced with not one, not two, not three, but four fully AI-generated submissions in just one day. When alerting the ‘writers’ to the fact their copy had been flagged by our AI-detecting software, The Capitalist was met by not one, not two, not three, but four objecting replies all attesting their on-the-whole innocence, as they had “only” used the tech to “refine” their copy – they promise! Not to worry that the AI detector flagged all four submissions as “100 per cent AI-written with high confidence”, upon a quick email search to check if any of the accused had previously attempted such tomfoolery, The Capitalist was not surprised to find a repeat offender. Their most recent pitch? An argument against the use of AI in the workplace. 

When you’re trying to explain something complex like the Bank of England’s strategy on interest rates, it’s tempting to reach for a football analogy. But to do this, it helps to know a thing or two about football. That could be the fatal flaw for chief market strategist for Europe, Middle East and Africa at JP Morgan Asset Management Karen Ward, when she wrote in the FT last week that the Bank was deploying the “Maradona effect.”

Football legend Maradona, Ward wrote, “would send other players off track while he proceeded straight down the middle of the pitch towards the goal.” Is that so? “The notion that Maradona just ran straight ahead is absurd,” one City AM reader observes.

Ward says she borrowed the phrase from former BoE governor Mervyn King. But did King know what he was on about? Such was his passion for football that the retired rate-setter went on to become… chair of the Marylebone Cricket Club.