My revelation, to be revealed in a moment, comes in the same week in which we marvel at news of Ai-Da the first robot to paint just like a human artist and of the European Union's regulatory acceptance of an AI imaging tool that reads chest X-rays without the involvement of a human radiologist.

Also this week, just as I was sure my mind had been as AI-boggled as was possible, out of my online New Yorker there leaps word that "one of the most recent AI sex-companion prototypes, a Spanish-made bot named Samantha, has been endowed with the ability to say no to sexual advances and to shut down if she feels disrespected or bored".

The same piece, Zoe Heller's How Everyone Got So Lonely and all about the booming trend towards our having the "romantic companionship" of sex-companion robots, further reports a growing acceptance of "robo-relationships". So for example a British doctor in a recent letter to The British Medical Journal describes prejudice against sex robots as "no more reasonable or morally defensible than homophobia or transphobia". But this is a family column and so leaving sex robots there let us dwell instead on the ostensibly asexual Ai-Da.

She/it is described by The Guardian in its piece Mind-blowing: Ai-Da becomes first robot to paint like an artist, as "the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot".

Ai-Da's story suits my purpose here for she is creative and so fits well with my revelation that for some time now this column has sometimes been written not by the endearing old human ACT Living Treasure you imagine but by a robotic AI tool.

In this my column has joined a growing worldwide trend, well-described by Carmine Starnino in her piece Poetry & digital personhood - on artificial intelligence and creativity for April's The New Criterion.

She reports: "Released in 2020 by OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up, GPT-3 is an AI tool that was force-fed a vast portion of the internet (the entirety of English-language Wikipedia adds up to only a fraction of the billions of words ingested).

"Endowed with 'neural' algorithms that help it make sense of all that data, GPT-3 can produce, from a simple prompt, astoundingly human-like writing of any kind: recipes, actuarial reports, film scripts, real-estate descriptions, technical manuals."

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In an experiment begun on the first Sunday of this year I have been alternating my columns, one week writing the column myself the following week delegating it to ISH-3, an AI tool not unlike GPT-3. My ISH is respectfully named after the Nobel winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, his latest novel Klara And The Sun is a brilliant investigation of ethically problematic human/robot relationships.

My experiment was conducted to see whether or not readers would detect any difference in columns generated by own mind and typed by my own flesh and blood fingers and columns made, after a simple prompt from me, by ISH the algorithmically agile robot. Not one reader detected any artificiality or anything sub-human in any of ISH's columns.

I have ended the experiment now (and this column you are reading is by the flesh and blood Ian) but conducted it to illustrate the ways in which AI begins to achieve things we used to smugly think only humans would ever be able to do.

So as we see there are now radiographerbots capable of doing what fleshly radiographers used to do, artistbots (vangoghbots?) that can paint with originality and flair and columnistbots capable of imitating the originality and flair and exquisite readability of even the most gifted and popular of human columnists.

Meanwhile Carmine Starnino's ripper piece quoted from and linked to above, has given me a Big Idea. She dwells on how AI tools like GPT-3 (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) are now massively employed for the writing of poetry. Her overall argument, beautifully argued, is that only humans can write true poetry. But leaving that issue for another day and sharing her admission that some robo poetry seems terrific (one clear-headed and sober robot's famous re-writing of Coleridge's greatest hit, his opium-triggered Kubla Khan, seems an improvement on Coleridge's original) one is moved to imagine a robocreative Canberra City Poet.

This column has long argued for the creation of the post of City Poet for this cultured federal capital city (in recent time one of these columns was by me and the other by my ISH) since after all every self-respecting city in the UK and in the USA has such an embodied pillar of culture.

It occurs to me that my lack of success so far in persuading this city's political movers and shakers to create the role may be do with fears of how much it would cost. But a Canberra City Robopoet would not need to be paid a salary and, inexpensively accommodated anywhere (ISH and I have lots of room in our study and offer to have the poet bot board with us) would be a cheap-as-chips institution but with the power to do mighty poetical things to lift the hearts, minds and imaginations of Canberrans.

Ye Canberra candidates in the coming election, I give you this simple prompt. Now that the vexed question of expense is not an issue, why not make Canberra voters your election promise to install our city's first City Poet?