As many a twitchy-legged theatre-goer has discovered, Shakespeare just isn't very funny. Maybe it's a time thing – jokes don't age well. Maybe he just wasn't very funny as a person. We'll never know, of course. But I suspect he wasn't a barrel of laughs in real life: his gags are mainly insults, which is a dark kind of wit. At a time when social status was an all-encompassing concern, people assaulted each other with words. If you can get others to laugh at your target, you win twice over. It was a violent age, so perhaps word-play was safer than sword-play.

In Henry IV, part 1, Falstaff derides Prince Henry for being skinny. "You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish."  I asked AI to bring those words to life and into the modern world to see how they fared.

AI suggested a sequence of baffling scenes: solitary women in business suits confront monstrous fishheads. At least, I hope they're fishhead. But those words 'Bulls Pizzle' appear to have slipped through the 'naughty word' filtered that Midjourney deploys to prevent the inevitable flood of AI porn. 

Consequently, what emerges seems to be a psych-erotic drama played out on the humdrum streets of Bishopsgate. The greyness of the city counter-balanced by the grotesque. Monstrous male-ness and the silent anger of women.

There is a drama and poignancy here.  It's hard to accept that a machine can generate such emotionally charged images – but the emotion is probably my contribution – and by recognising and approving them as being somehow True and Valuable, AI learns a little more about us.