In her fascinating book, Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford relates how, at the end of the 19th century, Europe was captivated by a horse called Hans that apparently could solve maths problems, tell the time, identify days on a calendar, differentiate musical tones and spell out words and sentences by tapping his hooves. But, as Crawford says, the story is compelling: "the relationship between desire, illusion and action; the business of spectacles, how we anthropomorphise the non-human, how biases emerge and the politics of intelligence". Eliza was the first chatbot, but she can be seen as the beginning of a line of inquiry that has led to current generations of huge natural language processing (NLP) models created by machine learning. Last year, the Guardian assigned it the task of writing a comment column to convince readers that robots come in peace and pose no dangers to humans. Having typed that last sentence, I had the idea of asking GPT-3 to compose an answer to the question: "Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?" But then I checked out the process for getting access to the machine and concluded that life was too short and human conjecture is quicker – and possibly more accurate.