"Blurb writing is a mini art form," Iris Murdoch once wrote in a letter to former Penguin blurb writer Elizabeth Buchan. And like many other art forms, companies have been experimenting with the idea that it could be created without an artist. A German company that provides digital book distribution and marketing services to publishers has announced it will integrate ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions by drawing on publicly available internet data, into its software. "During the beta phase, publishers can test the benefits of the artificial intelligence tool for their digital book marketing," states Bookwire, adding that it will only use ChatGPT if a publisher agrees and the disclaimer that the company "does not assume any responsibility for the content created by ChatGPT". But there is also another question that needs to be asked.

Old English epic poem Beowulf is the work of a single author, say researchers. Scientists used computers to analyse the text and noticed grammatical and stylistic similarities throughout – suggesting it was the work of one person. This included consistent use of punctuation, similar vocabulary and the creation of unusual words made by joining two mundane words together. The poem is one of the most famous Old English tales. It tells of a man rescuing the Danes from a fearsome monster and its mother before later being killed by a dragon.

I never learned anything in the Saturday-morning Chinese school I was forced to attend as a child, but that's not what motivates my choice here. There were plenty of reasons for my poor performance in those classes--my resentment at having to miss the "Super Friends" cartoon being just one of them--so I don't blame Chinese characters for my failure. No, my objection is a practical one: I'm a fan of literacy, and Chinese characters have been an obstacle to literacy for millennia. With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn three thousand.