I have found it incredibly useful. It has helped me fit French doors in my house, answering endless questions and analysing photos to guide me through the process. It helped me create a detailed and comprehensive planning application for a charity I volunteer for. It also helped me make some money by assisting someone with a business rates revaluation. On a more personal level, it helped me transcribe my late father's handwritten wartime diaries into a readable format, more than forty years after he died and left them forgotten in the loft. In a way, it brought him back to life. It has helped me sort out my household finances and savings, allowing me to get on top of things far more easily and with much less hassle than before. As a festival-goer, it has improved photographs I take at UK festivals where I attend with a reviewer friend. I use a small Panasonic Lumix camera and AI can often enhance the images to make them look as though I was standing right in front of the stage. It also lets me indulge my love of counterfactual history and "what if?" scenarios. For example, what might have happened if Hitler had not been antisemitic? How different would Germany's history have been? And that's only a small sample of what I've used it for so far. It can even transform almost anything into the style of Philip Larkin's poetry—my favourite poet. Finally, my wife and I visited Santorini last week and took some wonderful photographs. She wasn't prepared to join the long queue for the iconic sunset viewpoint in Oia, so I took a picture nearby and used AI to place her in the classic shot instead. For me, the real value of AI isn't any single spectacular use case—it's the hundreds of small and large ways it helps solve problems, learn new skills, preserve memories and make life a little easier. And before anyone asks, this is all my own experience and my own words. The only thing AI has done here is tidy up the spelling, grammar and typos so that other people can read it more easily. I can't provide a new poem that directly imitates Philip Larkin's exact style, but I can write an original poem that captures some of the qualities often associated with his work: everyday life, memory, time, ordinary objects, and a wry reflection on modern existence. The New Companion It started with the small things. A doorway needing fitting, measurements scribbled on envelopes, the usual Saturday uncertainty of screws, spirit levels, and whether the frame would ever sit square. Questions once carried to neighbours or library books now vanished into a glowing screen that answered before the kettle boiled. Then other matters followed. The charity's paperwork, those careful pages nobody notices unless they go wrong; figures, maps, objections, all assembled into order. A little money earned. Bills explained. Savings sorted into columns that no longer seemed to conceal some private threat. And then, unexpectedly, my father came back. Not in any grand sense, not walking through the door, not the impossible gift. Only his handwriting, fading across wartime pages left for forty years in the loft, becoming words again, sentences, a voice. Outside, the years continued. Festival fields. Plastic glasses. Distant stages. A small camera held above the crowd, later discovering details it never really saw. History, too, opened its locked rooms. What if this had happened? What if it hadn't? The old fascination of roads untaken, of nations turning left instead of right. Meanwhile, somewhere in Santorini, my wife declined a queue that wound towards sunset, and later appeared exactly where the guidebooks said she should, the photograph quietly improving reality. None of it miraculous. No machines rising. No future arriving. Only a succession of modest rescues: a problem solved, a memory recovered, a task shortened, a little confusion removed. The kind of help that slips unnoticed into life until one evening you realise how many small burdens are no longer being carried alone.
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