If you were the kind of person to think that AI will replace writers, I’d shortly be suggesting you ask ChatGPT just what precisely foul language I would be saying to you.

But you’re not, and I’m not, and while these days a lack of belief in the perfection of AI is seen as meaning you’re a Luddite, that’s an hallucination. As is the amount of time I just spent thinking about whether it’s “an hallucination” or “a hallucination”. It’s true that an AI writing app would not have hesitated for a moment, but I’m taller, so there.

Earlier this week, I had to write a short news article about yet another generative AI app, this time called Claude. One of its things is that it can describe what you’re looking at. I can see the benefits for anyone with sight problems, but otherwise, it seems less useful. I know I’m looking at a tree, thanks.

But even that tree example was clearly far too much effort for me this time, so instead I pointed my iPhone and Claude at whatever in the hell was in front of me. Since you know AI is trained on all the actual writing that all the actual writers have all the actually written, I did briefly wonder whether I was going to get a description of my office as it would be written by Jane Austen.

I did not.

Instead, this AI app had the talent to read — upside down — that a bag on the desk was from the Bagley College of Engineering, but also the cheek to say that my desk is messy. This is the messy desk of someone working in technology, it said.

So right now, directly as a consequence of that appalling and appallingly accurate description, this desk of mine is now on its side, pushed up against a wall. I’ve tided the top by shoving everything to the left, now I’m tidying up everything that was underneath it. And if I promise you that it’s fewer than ten years since I put that desk together, I’d like you to explain how underneath it there is a model kit for the space station in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from when that show ended in 1999. It looks like bits are missing now, and it certainly doesn’t look as if I ever got around to making it.

But if AI would describe that, I imagine, as brutal fictional architecture, there was a time when Deep Space Nine felt as much like my home as my office does. I reviewed the pilot on 1993 or whenever it was, then didn’t watch any more until 1999, but along the way I read 170 of the scripts. Somehow seeing it on the page made then seeing it on TV seem so very familiar.

I think what I’m realising today is that places matter. And that I should therefore be a bit tidier about mine.