I used to be a massive liar. Now I love saying sorry

Another week, another hoo-ha brought about by new technology. According to a piece on the Daily Mail website, a spate of recent celebrity apologies — from Whoopi Goldberg, podcaster Joe Rogan and Elon Musk — might not have been true apologies at all. When run through an AI-detector, it seemed there was a greater than 25 per cent chance that these mea culpas weren’t mea at all: they had been crafted by ChatGPT instead.

Although Goldberg, Rogan and Musk have neither confirmed nor denied these allegations — or got ChatGPT to do it for them — this does raise the question: has technology presented us with the option never to apologise again? Never to go through the shameful, mortifying, sweaty process of throwing up our hands and going, “I was WRONG. I upset people. I did a bad. I will get better”— but instead to outsource it by pressing a button on our iPhone? Have we un-invented the personal, heartfelt apology?

If we have, I would be very sad. More than that, I would feel very sorry for our entire species. I came to apologising relatively late in life — for which I am, obviously, very sorry. I was raised in a household where apologising was not done properly. If someone erred and then apologised, the apology was never accepted. Rather than the joy of a clean slate and forgiveness, apologies were seen as something to be totally dismissed — in favour of the aggrieved mentioning the original infraction repeatedly in increasingly guilt-inducing terms.

When, in 1986, I committed my Great Crime — losing The Stanley Gibbons Guide to Stamp Collecting from the local library, thus incurring the ultimate shame to our family: overdue fines of up to £1 — it was mentioned over and over again, no matter how many times I apologised or wept.

In light of this grievous mistake, I was given a new, distressing nickname, Catie Cock-Up, so that I would be remembered, centuries hence, as someone who had quite impressively managed to lose a huge book in a house the size of a bread bin.

As is the trademark of all children whose apologies are not accepted, inevitably I went on to become a massive liar. If you can never be forgiven, it’s best not to make mistakes — and if you do make a mistake, you simply lie about it. You know that in future your best option is to pretend to be perfect instead.

Over the years, I lied about who had broken a china figurine of a German shepherd dog; who had eaten all the jelly cubes, thus resulting in a very watery Christmas Day trifle; and who had used Dad’s razor to shave their legs for the first time, leaving it looking like a tiny yeti on a stick. After all, I was still being called Catie Cock-Up — three years later — so I figured that under the terms of this blanket, rolling punishment, I might as well chuck in a couple of bogof crimes in some kind of value-for-eternal-damnation deal.

It was only in my twenties, when I moved in with my husband, that I started to see the value in apologising. Primarily when he seemed utterly bewildered as to why a fully grown woman would claim not to have eaten the last of the ham when she was the only person who had been in the house with said ham and, indeed, smelt quite strongly of ham.

“I’m not angry, but I don’t understand where else it could have gone,” he said mildly. This was the revelatory moment when I realised that lying only really worked when you lived with seven other siblings, three of whom could not yet talk properly and could therefore always be relied on to be the patsy.

And it was in this moment — of realising I was basically gaslighting my terribly confused husband — that I tentatively tried, for the first time since 1986, to admit I was wrong and to apologise. I admit now: I wept hysterically throughout. I presumed I was seconds away from being both never forgiven and being given a new nickname. Perhaps “Hamburglar”.

So when he both instantly forgave me — “It’s fine, I’ll have just cheese” — and then never mentioned it again, as is the correct response to a heartfelt apology, I became, in a dazzling flash, a Born Again Apologiser. Oh, the simple, deep, fresh thrill of the truth. The relief in admitting you’re not — when it comes to ham, anyway — perfect. And the lasting joy of a functional system wherein a human accepts, and sees the value in, one of civilisation’s greatest inventions: a true, profound and heartfelt apology.

You can’t get all this if you just press the “Auto-Soz” button on your iPhone. You take away all the feelings. You take away being human.