I often find myself thinking of a sentence by the American novelist Nicholson Baker about the size of thoughts: “Most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine.”

The sentence comes to mind when I’m presented, casually, with ideas produced by our new emotionless sidekick “generative AI”. The most insistent examples of this come at the top of Google searches, which, rather than simply providing “real world” links to that morning’s query – “What time does the pub open?”, say – offer first a little machine-generated reply that allows you to imagine yourself slickly informed.

When the function was launched last year – in haste – it came up with silly advice about gluing cheese to pizza. There are fewer glitches now, because the AI worked out that it should pay no heed to satire. Increasingly, therefore, you get an executive summary of the world, with all interesting complications removed.

One result is that every idea begins to have less awkward substance – and, just perhaps, you lose the human sense of knowledge being something that you might take six pulls on a starter cord to ignite into life.

Drink to me only

I remember my old English teacher saying he had turned down a neighbour’s Burns Night invitation on the grumpy grounds that there were poets south of the border with greater claims to annual toasts. “Give me a Wordsworth supper,” he suggested, “and I’d be there like a shot.”

At a time when English nationalism is in urgent need of radical rescue from the flag-botherers of Reform UK, such a scheme might not be a bad idea. But which poet to choose? The downside of Wordsworth is that, far from writing exclamatory poems in praise of his dinner, he mostly restricted his diet to “porridge oats in vinegar”, a combo unlikely to pull in the punters. Coleridge is more promising, holding “that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings”; Keats, meanwhile, was a fad-dieter, who gave up meat to dampen his ardour in the presence of Fanny Brawne.

I’m open to suggestion, but my vote would go to Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, who offers a promising menu in Inviting a Friend to Supper: “Yet shall you have, to rectify your palate / An olive, capers, or some better salad / Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen, / If we can get her, … and then / Lemons, and wine for sauce…” A poem made to be delivered, as Jonson was buried in Poet’s Corner, standing up.

The wind cries Melba

With Storm Éowyn hammering at the bedroom windows, I lay awake at 3am researching, as you do, the origin of the naming of weather systems.

The Met Office came to the idea very late. The first use of storm names dates back to the beginning of the last century when a meteorologist named Clement “Wet” Wragge provided forecasts for Australian shipping.

In a 1902 report, he named a particularly noisy storm Melba after the “divine songster… Vessels bound west will surely meet Melba and have reason to remember the superb singing of the original but also recollect the howling and whistling of her cognomen.”

Wragge used the names of politicians he disliked for storms that were “unsure what to do next” or “whooping around making a nuisance of themselves”. He would, in this regard, have been spoilt for choice for political candidates who matched the chaotic power of the current cyclone.

• Tim Adams is an Observer columnist

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