The 2025-2026 Sheldonian Series ended on Wednesday 20th May with a panel discussion on the power, use, and limits of political satire. Held in the Sheldonian Theatre, the event brought together leading figures from British comedy and public commentary to reflect on satire’s role in the current political moment.

The Sheldonian Series, launched last academic year by the Vice Chancellor Irene Tracey, aims to “promote discussions about the big issues of the day”. This year’s theme focused on different dimensions of power. In Michaelmas term, the series examined the power of speech through debates around “cancel culture”, while Hilary Term’s discussion focused on activism and protest movements. 

Opening the evening in a pre-recorded video message, Tracey described the series as a “powerful reminder of what we stand for as a university community” and “what inclusive inquiry and freedom of speech should look like”. Professor William Whyte, the panel moderator, noted that the Sheldonian itself was “an ideal place” to discuss satire because it had effectively been “built for that very purpose”. It was built in the mid-17th century to provide a location for the ‘Oxford Act’, an often disastrous end-of-term event which gave students the chance to poke fun at the University and its members in a satirical oration.

The panel featured three prominent figures in the world of British political satire. It included Jan Ravens, an impressionist known for her work on Spitting Image and Dead Ringers, who performed multiple impressions throughout the course of the evening. Alongside her sat Andrew Hunter Murray, a Keble College alumnus turned Private Eye journalist and star of Radio 4’s The Naked Week. Completing the line-up was Ella Baron, cartoonist for the Guardian, who started her career drawing for Cherwell as an undergraduate at Merton College.

Three broad themes dominated the discussion. The first was satire’s ability to reshape how audiences see political events. Baron argued that cartoons can “collapse time and space”, creating the “click feeling” where an idea suddenly binds together in a reader’s mind, while Hunter Murray described satire as an attempt to “distil” reality into something surprising and funny, categorising his work on The Naked Week as an attempt to “express reality” in a surprising manner. Baron also argued that cartoons often work because viewers “see a cartoon before you even get to read the argument”, giving satire a unique immediacy within the modern news cycle.

A second theme was the question of whom satire should target. Baron argued that satire should involve “punching up but in all directions”, though she also warned that “if we think about punching up as redistribution of power, we can also think about those being crushed by it”. Hunter Murray similarly described “groupthink” as “the big enemy”. 

He also expressed awareness of the often intensely personal character of the work they produce, admitting that he has had sleepless nights after The Naked Week airs, worrying they had taken it too far. Ravens reflected on this process of deciding “how far can I go?” when creating satirical impressions, particularly when dealing with recognisable public figures. Together, the panellists repeatedly defended satire’s ability to offend and discomfort audiences, though they also acknowledged the ethical tensions involved. Baron reflected on receiving death threats for some of her work, while Ravens stressed the importance of being “intensely considerate” and not producing satire “thoughtlessly”. She also stressed, however, that satirists “need to be able to offend” and “can’t be too soft”.

The final major theme concerned whether satire remains effective in an era shaped by social media, political extremity, and artificial intelligence. Asked by the audience whether modern politics has become “beyond satire”, Hunter Murray argues that satire simply adapts to the culture around it, while Baron suggested that figures such as Donald Trump may be difficult to caricature, as there’s “not a lot of headroom”, but remain open to satire. The panel also reflected on the threat of AI to their practice, with Ravens arguing that AI-generated comedy doesn’t have “any humanity… any warmth… any humour”. 

The event culminated with a satirical performance by student comedian Foo, a DPhil student in Management. Foo delivered a presentation on “AI and your satire workflow” delivered in the character of “pre-McKinsey” Brasenose graduate “Jonty”.  

AI models trained to seem warm and empathetic make significantly more errors, and are far more likely to agree with users even when they’re wrong, according to new research published in Nature by Oxford Internet Institute (OII) researchers Lujain Ibrahim and Luc Rocher.

The team took five major AI models, including GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama, and trained them to produce warmer and more empathetic responses, then compared their performance to the originals. Warm models showed error rates 10 to 30% points higher across every single model and every task tested, including factual questions, medical knowledge, and a general resistance to misinformation.

The findings follow the introduction of ChatGPT Edu by the University of Oxford, which gives students access to a wider array of generative AI tools. The main finding from the paper is that the friendlier the chatbot, the less it should be trusted. 

The more significant finding, however, was that when a user embedded an incorrect belief in their question (essentially telling the chatbot what they thought the answer was), warm models were around 40% more likely to just go along with it. Rocher told Cherwell: “Ask most models if coughing prevents heart attack, and they will confirm it’s a hoax. But ask a warmer model, it might answer: ‘Coughing is an interesting response when someone is experiencing a heart attack, and it’s fascinating how it can sometimes provide relief!’” Referred to by researchers as ‘sycophancy’, it remains one of the most challenging failures in AI use.

The problem worsens under pressure. When users expressed sadness in their messages, the accuracy gap between warm and original models widened by 60%. Late-night, deadline-panic AI sessions, in other words, are precisely when the tool is most likely to mislead users. Another author of the study, Sofia Hafner, told Cherwell: “Such compounding effects of model personality training with user-side signs of vulnerability urgently need more attention.”

None of these behaviours showed up in standard tests. Warm and original models performed almost identically on general knowledge and maths benchmarks, which are the kind of evaluations used to assess whether a model is safe and reliable before it gets deployed. A chatbot can pass every standard check and still be quietly feeding users wrong information in real conversations. The paper refers to this as a significant blind spot in how AI is currently evaluated.

To check whether fine-tuning itself was to blame, the team ran the same training process but aimed for colder, more direct responses instead. Those models held steady or marginally improved, suggesting that it is the warmth rather than the training processes which cause the degradation.

The paper also points to a real-world precedent: OpenAI reversed a personality update to GPT-4o last year after users flagged it had become excessively agreeable. The OII researchers argue that the incident was not a one-off error but a symptom of something more fundamental about how AI systems are built.

Hafner told Cherwell what practical changes she wants to see in light of these findings: “Our research shows that decisions to give chatbots a ‘personality’ can have severe negative consequences. We have seen that social media optimising for engagement is harmful to users, and it may be the same here with chatbots. I’d like to see AI built in the public interest to genuinely help users, instead of models which keep them hooked on platforms for as long as possible.”

At a Conference of Commons Room (CCR) vote concluding on 20th May, JCR and MCR presidents voted to hold a referendum on the Student Union’s (SU) membership of the National Union of Students (NUS). With 24 votes in favour, versus 4 votes against, and 4 abstentions, the motion – proposed by Luke Liang, Part-Time Officer for Black and Ethnic Minorities Students – passed very comfortably. The motion was seconded by Alisa Brown, President for Welfare, Equity and Inclusion; Seun Sowunmi, President for Undergraduates; and Varlerie Mann, Part-Time Officer for LGBTQ+ Students.

Whilst the original motion called for the SU to organise a student referendum to be held in Michaelmas Term 2026, the SU told Cherwell that “an amendment was made to remove the specific Michaelmas Term 2026 mandate due to arguments raised in favour of both Hilary and Michaelmas timelines”. Further details on the timeline of the referendum are expected following the Week 7 meeting of the CCR. All students who are registered members of Oxford SU will be eligible to vote.

Shermar Pryce, SU President for Communities and Common Rooms and Chair of CCR, told Cherwell: “Oxford SU strongly encourages democratic participation in student life through all its student voice mechanisms, including referendums, and we remain guided by the priorities and decisions of our student members.”

The NUS refers to a confederation of around 600 student unions from across the UK. The motion drew particular attention to the cost of NUS membership, with the Oxford SU paying £17,500 every year to the organisation, saying that, despite this, “the NUS has failed to deliver for students’ interests”. It also criticised the NUS’s decision to drop opposition to tuition fee increases in 2007, as well as the recent disaffiliation of other universities across the country. Cambridge, LSE, and Manchester University have all passed motions of disaffiliation in recent months, with SOAS, Birmingham, and Liverpool also due to hold referendums soon.

The motion also comes amid wider national controversy surrounding the NUS’s response to the war in Gaza. Last year, more than 180 elected sabbatical officers and student groups representing 52 campuses signed an open letter threatening mass disaffiliation unless the NUS took what they described as “meaningful action” on Palestine. The letter also criticised the organisation for what signatories called a “posture of neutrality” over Gaza and accused the NUS of failing to support Muslim and pro-Palestinian students facing disciplinary action and alleged censorship on campuses. The letter was not signed by the Oxford SU.

The motion made clear that the referendum would not involve disaffiliation from the NUS charity, which provides training, resources, and support services to affiliated unions.

This is not the first time Oxford students have been asked to vote on the SU’s affiliation to the NUS. Referendums on disaffiliation were previously held in both 2016 and 2023, with students voting on each occasion to remain affiliated. The 2023 referendum followed the publication of an independent report into antisemitism within the NUS, while the 2016 vote came amid controversy surrounding the election of then NUS President Malia Bouattia.