A more relevant question would be : Could AI write a good novel? And the answer would be: Probably not!

Novels aside, I have always wanted to draw cartoons but I don’t have the drawing skills so when WordPress added the ability to generate images using AI, I thought this is my chance. A fat chance it turned out to be . The instruction I gave for the image above was AI writing a novel. Hard to tell what that robot is doing but it has some pencils nearby in a cup, one has an eraser, very old school!

For a recent post, which I have since deleted, I put in an instruction to generate an image of Donald Trump leading a flock of sheep off a cliff. This what AI generated:

Not bad but Donald appears to be leading the sheep away from the cliff’s edge and what is that sheep’s head doing on Donald’s lapel? And that electrical pole in the background, is it connected to anything?

So I tried keeping it simple and just wrote “sycophants” as an instruction. These folk turned up:

I don’t know…is it a birthday party?

So I tried the opening line of my favourite joke….A giraffe walks into a bar…

Well that’s a little better, it’s a giraffe and a bar. Of course you all know the punchline.

AI can generate the obvious but can it create humour? To use a music analogy, AI is the equivalent of a cover band, it can at best produce a copy of what has gone before. But can it take what has gone before, throw it up in the air and create something original?

I for one…….