Media
2 min read
August 5, 2025
Shaun Davies
Founder
Parnell published a column about the chatbot on the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, with an amazing cartoon by Simon Letch.
As the world slowed down and the heat turned up in December 2024, my friend Parnell McGuinness and I decided to set ourselves a holiday project.
We were going to turn Parnell, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, into a chatbot with her quirks, opinions and personality intact.
As a right-leaning columnist in a left-leaning publication, Parnell needs a thick skin, as readers tend to take issue with the things she has to say. So we called the bot Yell at Parnell.
All of her columns went into the training data, along with a 3000-word prompt that controls personality and reactions in specific scenarios. All in all it was a big success, with tens of thousands of chats over the course of a few days.
You can read Parnell's article about it here.
