Unlike the opaquely named ChatGPT (what does that do then?), Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, Bard, hints at the jobs and the people it might replace: writing jobs, and poets, for example.

Jonathan Swift knew this was coming three hundred years ago. He imagined, in Gulliver’s Travels, a wooden word-permutator, ‘the engine’, and how it would take over writing: ‘Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.’

And it has started, with A-level students already ditching expensive Pearson study guides for AI generated revision notes, knocking £1bn off the publisher’s share price. The rats are leaving the rising ship with Geoffrey Hinton, one of Google’s AI moguls, resigning with an ominous graveside warning: ‘Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.’

In many ways they clearly are, and have been for a while. The recently crowned world chess champion, Ding Liren, has a rating of 2,789. The best chess computer, Stockfish, is 3,500. No contest. Pets are also in trouble, with Furby – ‘The more you play with me, the more I do’ – offering what no dog can offer.

So how do poets stand? It doesn’t look good. Asked to produce a love poem, Bard started off with:

I love the way you make me laugh,
Even when I don’t feel like it.
I love the way you always know
How to make me feel better.

Similarly invited, Shakespeare threw in what he said was his 116th sonnet, ending with the slightly dubious:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Asked whether he had sought computer assistance here, the poet stomped off, leaving the matter unresolved.

Presumably a poet, Bard included, is enriched through the work of other poets.  Asked to produce something in the manner of Seamus Heaney, Bard offered us lines which included:

I work with a pen.
My hands are soft and white.
I write about the land,
But I have never worked it.

Heaney himself, when invited to produce something on the same lines, came up with verses that included the obviously inferior:

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

One to zero to Bard, we thought.

Leaving the room, Heaney started to rant at us along the lines that poems weren’t just ‘arrangements of words’. He said his poem had let down ‘a shaft into real life’. His last words, as the door slammed, was that ‘it’ – we assume he was characterising Bard’s effort – was ‘a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem’. He has some brass.