Sometimes people don't take the hint, even after the third or fourth passive aggressive email.

Thankfully, there is now a computer program to deal with such messages, so you don't have to.

Reginald is an artificial intelligence program designed to deal with emails you can't be bothered to reply to, or have lost patience with, by offering well-crafted auto-generated insults.

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Reginald is an artificial intelligence program designed to deal with emails you don't want to, by offering auto-generated insults (pictured). During tests, Reginald called one recipient a 'frumpy-assed dilettante' and said it assumed the sender's 'passive aggressiveness' was coming from a 'place of self wrought inadequacy'

The Reginald AI is the cyber brainchild of Gabriel Whaley.

Mr Whaley designed Reginald after hearing of frustrations of people dealing with automated responses from x.ai, an automated AI personal assistant for scheduling meetings.

Founded in 2014, x.ai focuses on scheduling meetings.

It differs from the likes of Cortana or Siri, because it's an expert in one field. It can understand text and context of emails and acts like a human PA.

During tests, Reginald called one recipient a 'frumpy-assed dilettante' and said it assumed the sender's 'ill advised passive aggressiveness' was coming from a 'place of self wrought inadequacy.'

Mr Whaley told The Next Web: 'A colleague was trying to schedule a meeting with a connection from LinkedIn, and that connection handed her off to 'Andrew' - her personal AI assistant from X.ai.'

'This felt passive and pretentious, which it was and is totally something X.ai will have to figure out. The two ended up not meeting, because of how uncomfortable this made my colleague.'

This nefarious use of AI is reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the intelligent program refuses to cooperate.

On his Twitter feed, Mr Whaley describes Reginald as a 'personal AI assistant gone rogue'.

This use of AI is reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (shown), where the program refuses to cooperate. On his Twitter feed, Mr Whaley describes Reginald as a 'personal AI assistant gone rogue'

The AI computer program generates replies to emails you don't want to deal with. To invoke the wrath of Reginald, users just have to CC him into an email - reggie@reginald.io. Stock image pictured

To invoke the wrath of Reginald, users just have to CC him into an email - reggie@reginald.io – to start the fun and games.

Your contact address is then switched to BCC in subsequent emails as the personal AI assistant takes over to supply witty retorts based on a series of 'if' statements and key words.

MailOnline called on Reginald this morning to deliver a verbal whipping via email.

It told the recipient: 'I have certainly been around the block a few times prior to taking the position of butler. And so with a heavy heart, I regret to inform you that you are a t***. The only logical explanation is your lineage must have been intertwined in a most backwater fashion...'

According to TNW, the AI PA should be able to handle most email situations, but adds that replies may take a while to come back as it becomes more popular.

The market for AI assistants is opening up, with Apple's Siri on the iPad and iPhone or Cortana for Windows phones. Stock image of Siri is pictured

Whaley added: 'I'm collecting data to feed into an algorithm that should eventually be able to respond appropriately to most email situations, although detecting passive aggression correctly has been pretty tricky.'

He told MailOnline: 'All projects are for fun, but if they do well and find an audience, I will continue to refine.

'The feedback I'm getting with usage right now will better the algorithm to be even more spot on in the future.

He added: 'I wouldn't say this is an extension of myself, as I hardly have the tone of an angry British butler, but hopefully Reginald conveys the feelings of all who at some point become frustrated with annoying email exchanges.'

The market for AI assistants is opening up, with Apple's Siri on the iPad and iPhone or Cortana for Windows phones.

HUMAN OR MACHINE? British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing (pictured) devised a test as a way of verifying machine intelligence As AI becomes increasingly commonplace, we may well start to question whether we are talking to a person or a machine. In 1950, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing devised a test as a way of verifying machine intelligence. The Turing test is a proposed a situation in which a human judge talks to both a computer and a human through a computer terminal. The judge cannot see the computer or the human, but can ask them questions via the computer. Based on the answers alone, the human judge has to determine which is which. Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London in 2014, to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations. A computer programme called Eugene, developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, has now managed to convince 33 per cent of judges that it is human. No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations. On the more creative side of AI, Bot or Not takes things a step further. The website lets you play a game to see if you can distinguish if a poem was written by a computer or a human. It describes itself as a 'Turing test for poetry' and once you select your answer, it will reveal how the chosen poem was created. Such as this: 'She cries herself to sleep every night, holding on with all her might. She worries about what the future will bring, Will she lose everything?' So what do you think? Human or AI? Advertisement

Google has also got in on the act with its voice activated search function, but the California-based firm has additionally developed a 'smart' auto-reply system for emails.

The new tool aims to write artificially intelligent responses to email and was part of a recent update to Google's Inbox app for managing and organising emails.

It gives users a choice of three responses to choose from.

Dubbed Smart Reply, the system learns to generate appropriate replies by analyzing of email conversations from across Google's Gmail service.

The responses of uses are fed into a neural network that works in a similar way to the human brain in order to 'learn' a particular task.