Jon Schubin

Four people are standing outside a pub near Monument on a Thursday evening, about to take the first sip of their third Helles. “What do you do?” one says to the rest. “I work in tokenisation.” “Oh,” says the man next to him, “so do I.” And unbelievably, the other two say the same. “Well, this is awkward,” the first man says. “We must be competitors.” Two rounds later, after a fair amount of exposition and a couple of trips to the toilet, that same man finally says: “Wow.

For decades, the most consequential conversation in a customer’s financial life happened in a cubicle at the back of a branch: impersonal, slightly airless, an adviser clacking away on elevated keys. Most of those branches have closed. The conversation has moved to a chat window, minus the banks. Banks’ reflexive retort is to scold, chastise and discourage this behaviour. In my adopted homeland of Britain, this is practically a national pastime. It’s not working.

Sentences can be works of art. The best ones unspool in slight surprise, guiding readers to a destination both unpredictable and logical. Unfortunately, the writing algorithms of frontier models have distilled this delicate art down into a simple rule. I call it the pregnant phrase. One editor said it is a “cleft sentence.” These sentences only become apparent, as the snitch said, “at the close.” They use obfuscation as a near-constant literary device.