On Saturday morning I wake up to discover that my brother, who works for a tech firm, has sent me a message. “Someone I know told me they loved listening to Suno music and I laughed it off. But this evening I thought, what would I like?”

Attached is a song created by the generative AI platform, along with a prompt: “Joanna Newsom singing ukulele music, backed by a brass section.”

“Did you listen to the track?” he asks later. Not yet. If it’s bad, that would be vaguely reassuring, like learning the polar ice caps haven’t reached some critical point. And if it’s good? I press play while walking the dog.

The song, whimsically titled Clockwork Honey fills my ears, cheery and propulsive. An internal rhyme pairs “folded” with “eroded” in lyrics that feel Newsom-coded, while a slightly, well - clockwork - vocal, sings about love. It’s not bad. But it’s Newsom by numbers, as if everything that makes art human has been stripped back to the skeletal maths beneath.

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I remember a radio conversation I had with the writer Colm Tóibín where he said, with the same kind of desolate cheer........

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