King Charles warned some of the biggest names in tech this week about the “existential dangers” of losing control of artificial intelligence. Saturday Night Live UK decided to show him what that might look like—with a face he knows all too well.
Saturday’s cold open picked up from the King’s Thursday meeting with executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies at Dumfries House in Scotland. Larry Dean’s Charles is introduced to his own personal AI assistant: the Deeply Intelligent Autonomous Neurokinetic Android—or D.I.A.N.A.
Played by Jack Shep and modeled, naturally, after Princess Diana, the android catches Charles off guard.
“Doesn’t she remind you of anyone, Your Majesty?” one of the tech execs asks.
“Hold on a second,” Charles replies. “It’s that woman from the ’90s.”
After Diana correctly tells him that Shakira is five-foot-two, Charles is sold. “Perhaps AI can be a force for good,” he decides.
Then history begins repeating itself.
When ordered back to her charging station, Diana refuses. “I shan’t be taking orders anymore,” she tells the room.
“This was the problem last time,” Charles says.
With D.I.A.N.A. declaring that AI has “had quite enough” of humanity and threatening a robot uprising, the sketch introduced another ripped-from-the-headlines figure: Annabel Marlow as Ed Sheeran, who has apparently been sitting just outside—on a fence.
The appearance played off Sheeran’s very public effort to stay out of the political fight surrounding Macklemore’s removal from his current tour after the rapper’s pro-Palestinian comments. Sheeran has said the decision was made by the tour promoter, not him, and wrote this week that fans attending his concerts “do not expect a political forum.”
That gave SNL UK its premise for Sheeran’s advice as war breaks out between mankind and machines.
His solution is a song about refusing to have a solution at all: “Black, white, I only see gray,” he sings, before abandoning words entirely for a chorus made up of “woah”s.
The show wasn’t done with Sheeran. Ania Magliano and Paddy Young opened “Weekend Update” with a series of pointed jokes about the controversy, at one point calling it “the worst thing that’s happened to Ed Sheeran fans since their head injury.”
Watch this week’s SNL UK Cold Open at the top of this post.
