How to humanise a robot

The robots could fix the street robots, replace the raggedly traffic controllers and fill in the potholes

- Christian Stephen

There is no escaping artificial intelligence. No matter how clever we think we are, our lives are going to be affected. We can only hope that it is in a good way, but many of us have grown accustomed to the threat of AI being there to take over our jobs.

It is quite possible that AI could do the job of designing and laying out the pages of the newspaper. ChatGPT could find the right combination of words and matching images for the front page — and do it all without cursing and complaining while actually making the deadline on Thursday afternoon.

The same goes for producing a weekly column. It just needs the right prompting: “Write a column in the style of Christian Stephen but make it less grumpy and leave out the dad jokes.”

So AI joins the long queue of threats to jobs in the media. And the situation is the same for anything involving creativity. Writing, music, art, architecture - it is all ripe for the artificial treatment. A Damien Hirst spot painting? Too easy. One of those two-minute punk bangers by The Ramones? Be serious!

These are just frivolous examples, because the limitless resources of the AI “machine” mean the real problem for us mere mortals is how to tell the difference between artificial intelligence and genuine stupidity.