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 ...