A friend of mine is a passionate advocate for the power and merit of AI chatbots. I’ll forgive him for a number of reasons. He works in tech. He’s a doer in a world of delegators. He’s a creative problem solver. He’s an extremely busy human (I’m not sure when he actually sleeps) juggling work, projects, interests and, you know, life stuff.

An AI chatbot makes sense to him. Because he’s a natural evangelist on all topics that resonate with him (one of the reasons we’re friends) we’ve had a lot of discussions about the large language model technology recently. It’s emergent and fast evolving. It saves time (big time). It does a good job. Ay there’s the rub. Is it going to put me out of one?

Perhaps the fact I’ve just quoted an idiomatic expression from Shakespeare without even thinking about it, which we all understand the meaning of thanks to wider societal context, means it won’t. But I must admit to feeling a little bit squeezed. And that’s the saving grace I think. Feeling. Lived experience. Something I try and bring to all my own writing and help others do when I craft content for them.

As I understand it, and I never pretend to be an expert when I’m not, AI chatbots operate on the basis of souped-up predictive text and are able to answer questions. I think what good writers do is rather to have a conversation. Present a view, yes, but with their bias laid out so transparently that alternative opinions are welcome, no, actively sought.

If an AI chatbot can hoover up information and serve it up as a polished end product, a human writer can be deliberately or subconsciously choosy. As I compose a piece of text I may draw on (or reject) memories, employ my imagination, be affected by my mood, appetite, energy levels and surroundings or be subject to interruption (a laptop battery died in the creation of this copy).

In essence, it’s a case of delightful, authentic inefficiency versus trained, economical delivery (and in fact there’s no guarantee the AI chatbot is even right). The endless debate of man versus machine. Perhaps it’s fairest to say that both have their place and their uses, though I’ll always fly the flag of the personal approach for the simple reason it creates connection.

Until persuaded otherwise there’s still an element of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ‘the answer is 42’ about AI chatbots for me. They’re not going to take seven and a half million years to pipe up like Deep Thought, but when it comes to 'life, the universe and everything', we’re probably better served by a warm discussion over an even warmer tea than by a computer.

And even the ultimate evangelist for AI chatbots I think is fundamentally on my side. Watching the ‘starfaring civilisation’ video of Elon Musk on TikTok I was taken on a journey in the course of a minute because of the emotionally open way he delivered his speech as much as what was said. AI chatbots are exciting, but nothing will ever fascinate me more than the human brain.