A haiku:

Whispering wind hums,
cherry blossoms drift like dreams,
moonlight paints the dawn.

A nursery rhyme:

Little starfish in the sea,
Drifting, dancing, wild and free.
Waves come high, then roll away,
Splash and sparkle — time to play!

Tiny fish swim here and there,
Bubbles floating everywhere.
Seashells shine upon the shore,
Ocean whispers, “Play some more!”

A thriller synopsis:

When investigative journalist Claire Lawson receives an anonymous tip about a missing scientist, she uncovers a sinister conspiracy tied to a secret government experiment. As she digs deeper, powerful enemies hunt her down. Racing against time, Claire must expose the truth before she becomes the next one to disappear.

Not bad, huh? You probably didn’t know I was so talented. Well, I’m not. I didn’t write any of the foregoing. It was all “written” by AI, aka, artificial intelligence. All I did was request a haiku, a nursery rhyme, and a thriller synopsis.

Uh-oh.

Pretty soon, AI will be writing entire novels. Amazon already lists a bunch of books that give step-by-step instructions on how to do just that.

In a world in which lies are passed off as facts, what is real anymore? Are humans passé? There are chess programs available online that can beat the best human players. Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian prodigy who once won the World Chess Championship, has an Elo rating of 2882, the highest ever achieved by a human. Some computers rate way above 3000.

I dabble in chess. I thought I was pretty good, having once won my high school’s chess tournament. (Only about four guys played, so it’s less impressive than it sounds.) Now, if I set my computer program to “Neanderthal” level, I may win an occasional match. If I play white. And if I’m not having a cocktail.

It will only get worse — in chess and in life. The fastest modern supercomputers can crunch something like a quintillion possibilities a second. The quantum computers scientists are developing can theoretically solve in seconds what would take a modern supercomputer 10,000 years.

Magnus, we hardly knew you.

I’m not against AI in general. I just read that it’s being used to help decipher 2,000-year-old scrolls damaged by an ancient eruption of Vesuvius. And AI must be a boon to researchers.

I also read that Google’s search engine now has AI functionality, which I assume means that if you ask it how many camels can pass through the eye of a needle, you’ll now get a philosophical and historical dissertation, as opposed to “None. What are you, nuts?”

Since I’m tired of computers yelling at me (“Make a legal U-turn, idiot!”), I won’t try the camel/needle thing.

But you should go for it.

Lawrence De Maria has also dabbled in thriller-writing. And he knows for a fact that even AI can’t rhyme the word “orange.” He asked ChatGPT.