Ding dong merrily ON AI

Would you turn to ChatGPT to organise Christmas? Sarah Rainey gave it a try. Here's how she got on...

- WORDS: SARAH RAINEY DAILY MAIL.

I had imagined - perhaps foolishly - that this help might come from a friend, sharing some elusive gift ideas or foolproof Christmas recipes, or even my husband, offering to wrap the kids' presents for the first time in his life.

Instead, rapidly running out of time as the months before Christmas tick away, I find myself turning to a more unusual source of assistance: ChatGPT.

The online artificial intelligence chatbot is free and - it turns out – pretty easy to use.

Just type your questions into the search box (at chatgpt.com) and within seconds a detailed answer, sourced from a huge amount of online information, is generated.

According to recent statistics, 1.4 million Brits now use the service every day, but it's more commonly used by students for sneaky help with homework or people handling complex data, rather than festive crisis management. So, can technology be any match for a mum at Christmas?

Here's how ChatGPT fared on everything from writing my Christmas cards to doing the food shop.

Christmas card inspiration

Writing cards is probably one of my least favourite (and most time-consuming) Christmas tasks.

Were I, or my children, designing them ourselves, ChatGPT has suggestions for pictures to draw on the front - from 'a cosy cabin with snow falling gently' to 'a Christmas tree twinkling in a window' or 'a few reindeer prancing'.

Hardly imaginative, and while some paid-for artificial intelligence programs can design images based on text prompts, ChatGPT is not one of them.

It does, however, have ideas for what to say inside; ideal if you're suffering from writer's block.