I was visiting my son in California when I first heard about ChatGPT, the real-time writing app which has gotten so many academic knickers in such a twist. As a writer of comedy my son is also concerned about the app’s capabilities, and he was not greatly reassured by the fact that none of the jokes he asked it to write while I was with him made either of us laugh: the same, after all, is true of the entire Hannah Gadsby oeuvre, and she has a much bigger house in a much more salubrious LA suburb than my son’s. Not all teachers, it should be said, feel as threatened. While many at the top end of the profession view the incursion of AI into the classroom as an especially egregious form of dumbing down which should be dealt with like an invasive species, those of a more progressive disposition see it as an inevitability which it would be Canutish to resist, and for whose accommodation traditional classroom rules must be rewritten. I can certainly see why Australian teachers might have mixed feelings. With Australia now sitting below Burkina Faso in the UN’s child literacy rankings, many might welcome an innovation which makes the business of marking homework more interesting – not to say more educational; another survey has revealed that some marsupials now have a higher IQ than the average Australian high school teacher.

The people who should be most worried, of course, are admen like me. One of the main reasons I moved to Australia in the 1980s was the quality of its advertising back then, the best of it as witty and original as anything coming out of London, notwithstanding the distractions of longer summers and even longer lunches. The Australians who set the creative bar back then could have applied their writing skills in other fields with equal success, and more than a few did go on to produce best-selling books and films. But thirty years later writing standards in Australian advertising have fallen even lower than reading standards in our schools. Where there used to be originality there is now homogeneity, where there used to be wit there is now woke, and on the rare occasion when someone attempts something as basic as rhyme or word-play the results are more likely to curl toes than split sides. Pity the thousands of Sydney rail commuters who are confronted each morning by the Mortgage Choice billboard which tells them ‘You’re never a loan’.  When I told ChatGPT to write a mortgage ad headline it took it 15 seconds to come up with ‘Unlock Your Dream Home: Get a Mortgage That’s a Perfect Fit!’ Not quite as good, perhaps, as ‘You find the house, we’ll come to the party’ – a home loan headline I once wrote for ANZ – but certainly an improvement on the meaningless groaner Mortgage Choice signed off on.

As far as I know, nobody has yet created an app which can combine the written word with musical notation, so when AI makes my copywriting skills completely redundant, I will turn my hand to musicals. They have always been where the big bucks are for writers, but they have the added attraction for copywriters that they don’t involve writing half as many words as novels or screenplays. And nowhere is brevity more important than in the selection of a title. With few exceptions, the most successful musicals have one-word titles (Evita, Godspell, Wicked) and many are a single syllable (Hair, Cats, Chess). Until recently my intention, then, had been to write Ned – a musical which would not only boast the world’s shortest title, but whose subject matter would be uniquely Australian. And I had gotten as far as making a list of words which rhyme with my title when I happened to hear Tim Minchin being interviewed on ABC Radio National’s The Stage Show.  At the time he was working on a new show about a real person whose identify he wouldn’t reveal, but who he was prepared to say is ‘someone who is hard to like but had an extraordinary life’. Have I been, I wondered, gazumped? Or could it be that the most successful musical writer this country has ever produced wants finally to atone for having once used his undoubted talents to defame and grossly mischaracterise the greatest cleric this country has ever produced?  Can we look forward to Pell, the Musical?