Bletchley Park: AI, Diversity, and Anonymity

Bletchley Park county estate was the secret codebreaking headquarters during WWII where Alan Turing and co would crack the Enigma code and help bring an end to the war by an estimated two years, saving many lives in the process.

To ensure absolute secrecy, no transmission ariels were allowed to protrude from the buildings as this might raise suspicions with passing bombers. Instead, hundreds of bike riders were tasked with getting important information and updates to those who mattered. The rural location meant it was less likely to be targeted, but Bletchley was chosen for more pragmatic reasons. It was smack bang in the middle of the main train route between Cambridge and Oxford, meaning the best mathematicians could be brought up quickly and at short notice. Workers were allocated to specific huts and teams were forbidden from talking about what they were doing both during and after the war or else face charges of treason and imprisonment. So while returning soldiers were glorified, the codebreakers could only say they had menial office jobs. Such integrity seems unimaginable today where we are encouraged to share every experience, as this article demonstrates.

75% of the work force were women and Alan Turing, a gay man, was prosecuted for homosexual acts in 1952. As punishment, he accepted a hormone treatment known as ‘chemical castration’ rather than go to prison. In 1954, aged 41, he committed suicide from cyanide poisoning. He was granted a pardon in 2013 by then PM Gordon Brown after a national campaign. In 2017, the ‘Alan Turing Law’ was introduced which retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. This feels particularly relevant today given the attack by the Trump administration on diversity and LGBTQ+ identities. To put this into context,  Slate reports Trump ‘fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with a white retired general, who is both significantly less qualified for the job by military standards and ineligible for the role by those same military standards’. So much for fairness and meritocracy. Bletchley was largely shaped by a gay man and a 75% female workforce, demonstrating the value of a diverse workplace.      

Due to its historic links to computing, Bletchley was the location for the first AI Safety Summit in 2013. It currently has an exhibition on ‘The Age of AI’ which is why I visited with students from Nottingham Trent University. We are about to embark on a research trip to Europe to see how AI and creative technology can help better engage younger people in the political process and civic engagement. Our research is fed back to councillors from Ashfield, Bolsover, and Mansfield to help inform policy and investment and builds on a research trip last year where we visited the first AI Gallery in Europe.

I feel ambivalent about AI. As a writer, I understand that stories are incredibly personal and the result of our unique social situations. We write stories because we want to share our experiences of life with the world. AI does not have experience or empathy or history and so I am dismissive of any fiction it produces because it is not shaped by  personal experience and so lacks the most fundamental quality of persuasion, ethos – the credibility of the speaker – to borrow from Aristotle.

But I do find myself increasingly turning to programmes like Chat GPT as a personal research assistant when I need to find the answer to an immediate question that will help me with setting a scene, such as what wild flowers grow in the hedgerow at a specific times of the year. And as someone who produces a monthly video essay based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence, I sometimes have difficulties sourcing an image to match the script, such as for the video above. I used a programme like DeepAI to generate an image of a ‘squashed friend locus beetle’ which Lawrence was aghast at when he encountered it in a market in Mexico in November 1924. Quite rightly, you have to flag the video up as including ‘artificial or synthetic content’ on YouTube.

One area of interest at the Bletchley exhibition regarded AI Influencers. These, like their human equivalents, are mainly used for branding and selling products. But what if we were able to create an AI Influencer related to our research aim? A virtual assistant who could break down complex ideas to make the political process more accessible, or was able to flag up flaws in populist conspiracy theories, explicitly explaining how Tommy Robinson or Andrew Tate were not victims of the Deep State but people who have broken specific laws.

Part of the drive towards conspiracy theories is firmly grounded in reality. Lots of people, particularly white men, feel alienated and ignored, and so it is understandable – to an extent – why they may find belonging in spaces where they feel listened to. Any kind of AI support would need to address these nuances but perhaps introduce more positive or alternative means of belonging than those determined by social media algorithms.

If you have any suggestions about our research question, please do get in contact. And whether you like AI or not, visit Bletchley at some point in your life to pay respect to the many unknown people who dedicated their lives – without recognition – to help bring an end to the war.    

Bletchley Park, Sherwood Dr, Bletchley, Milton Keynes MK3 6EB. The AI exhibition is on till 2026. Visit the website here.     

Celebrating Notts Language

Map of Nottingham with language tags. When I first returned to Nottingham, I kept popping into the cob shop at the Theatre Royal tram stop because the staff there had such thick Nottingham accents. One of them had a form of Notts turrets, interjecting duck at every opportunity: ‘Egg mayo, duck, with lettuce, duck, on white or brown, duck…’ It was music to my ears, a lovely warm feeling, like sinking slowly into a bubble bath and turning the hot tap with my toes. God, how much I’d missed those flat vowels.

Dialect is a form of intangible culture and an integral part of identity. It carries the knowledge, values, attitudes, and experiences of people. The Notts dialect is something I’ve celebrated and promoted in various forms during my 13 years as LeftLion Literature editor, through comics such as Dawn of the Unread and Whatever People Say I Am, through documentaries on the wireless, and more recently through the writing of that mardy bloke from Eastwood – dialect was the second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. Natalie Braber, a Professor in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, provided the contextual essays for this.

I mention this as Natalie has recently finished a project where she interviewed a broad range of people, including schoolchildren, ex-miners, locals – those who were born here, and those who have moved here – to try and map out the Notts accent. Each participant was asked ‘to share what language means to them: their favourite words and expressions – whether dialect, familect (words used within families), ethnolect (language associated with an ethnic group), work-related vocabulary or words from another language; and poems, stories and songs which invoke place’.

I submitted shin-tin’ as my favourite word (‘she isn’t in’) and read an extract from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). I find the dialect in Lawrence’s work, such as the poem ‘The Collier’s Wife’, too complex to read. Only those who straddle the Derbyshire/Notts border, like mining historian David Amos, have the tongue for it. This is why ‘Celebrating Notts Language’ is important, because it captures the richness and variety of spoken dialect.

Although the East Midlands dialect of Middle English was an influence on the development of Standard English, there’s been little research into the spoken English of the area. Dialect tends be thought of in terms of north (bath) and south (baath) when perhaps there needs to be a tripartite distinction. Nottingham, as always, is hard to categorise, borrowing from the north (‘bus’) and south (‘aaas’/house) – exactly as you would expect from a city bang in the middle of the country.

There are many arguments suggesting language is becoming homogenous, mainly due to the globalisation of work and media, would it be too radical to suggest that a bigger threat to dialect is we are talking less to each other? The mining and industry communities that Lawrence and Sillitoe wrote about are gone – as is the pub where ‘everybody knows your name’. More people work remotely or interact with a screen rather than a human. Millennials no longer need to call each other when a status update or WhatsApp message serves the same function. Surely this must impact on language, accent, and dialect.

Natalie’s website: Celebrating Notts Language 

This article is a variation on one published on the Digital Pilgrimage, 14 August 2023. Further Reading

  • James Walker/Made in Manchester Productions. Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets of the Pits (2021) BBC Radio 4
  • James Walker. Thar’t a Mard Arse. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. Mardy ducks: Nottingham Dialect Words. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. What is the Nottingham dialect and where does it come from? Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. Lawrencian Dialect. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber and Jonnie Robinson (2018) East Midlands English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Natalie Braber and Sandra Jansen (Eds.) (2018) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Natalie Braber (2018) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. In: N. Braber and S. Jansen (eds.) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 243-274.
  • Natalie Braber (2018) Performing identity on screen: Language, identity, and humour in Scottish television comedy. In: R. Bassiouney (ed.) Dialect and identity performance. London: Routledge, 265-285.
  • Natalie Braber, Suzy Harrison and Claire Ashmore (2017) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
  • Natalie Braber and David Amos (2017) Images of the Coalfields. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
  • Natalie Braber and Diane Davies (2016) Using and creating oral history in dialect research. Oral History 44(1), 98-107.