You may have seen a lot of print, radio and TV coverage about the new artificial intelligence apps that are popular.

In general the coverage all goes the same way; it starts with an introduction that we later find out was written by AI. Oh how very clever.

So I was going to nick the idea.

I charged an AI with the job of writing a mildly amusing newspaper column about AI.

I didn’t want to aim too high in the comedy stakes and give the game away.

What it produced was so good I immediately deleted it and promised to never tell a soul.

I can’t afford for the bosses at this newspaper to realise they could replace me with an AI chatbot.

It wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep and it wouldn’t keep doing columns on the cost of living crisis as subtle hints about a pay rise.

This is a real worry for those of us who type for a living and it probably serves us right.

For decades we have seen physical jobs replaced by robots and we may have lamented mildly but we still went to those self-scan tills.

We went along with the replacement of cashiers in the hope of an extra two pence off our shopping.

The slightly cheaper chickens have come home to roost and it is the turn of the middle-class jobs to be attacked.

What will life be like when all of the human jobs are done by an artificial, and probably superior, intelligence?

It could free humans up to enjoy their free time. The same could have happened with the invention of the Internet but it didn’t work out. Somehow we now have less leisure time than we did decades ago.

AI is already able to write TV scripts and books.

Are they any good? We may never know as we won’t have time to read them.

It’s already a problem in education. In Australia, universities are considering requiring handwritten essays after some students used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to do their work for them.

Let’s hope no one works out that you can write out what the chatbot produces for you.

In the future you might prefer to be seen by a robot doctor because there’ll be no way of knowing for sure if your human doctor actually sat the exams themselves.

It’s a worrying time and this is just the start.

In this column I have praised the machines, called them superior and accidentally referred to humans as a separate group to me.

Maybe this was written by an AI after all.

The worrying part is that you’re not sure.