Starmer may want us to embrace AI - but where does that leave us? - Toby Neal asks

Inspired by Sir Keir Starmer about the need to embrace the opportunities of AI, I had a little look online to see what could be done. It's amazing what's out there. Lots of sites which will write things for you. All you have to do is choose the subject matter. Then there are options about the style and tone. "Persuasive," "provocative," and that kind of thing.

If only these had been available during my schooldays, it would have made doing homework much easier. Naturally you would have had to do a little fiddling with the wording, and perhaps deliberately introduced one or two spelling or grammatical mistakes to give it a convincing human touch, although I can't believe modern students would stoop so low.

One or two things put me off. Some of the sites clearly wanted money. But also this. If this is all done by artificial intelligence, where would that leave me? Redundant - that's what.

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Let's stop being beastly to Rachel Reeves. She's doing her best.

The Tories keep saying she has crashed the economy - her cease and desist letters will be in the post - but be fair, she hasn't even got started. A lot of her Budget measures don't come in until April.

She should be celebrated as Britain's first female Chancellor in the same way Sir Keir Starmer is celebrated for being a toolmaker's son who has reached the office of Prime Minister.

Any criticism of her is clearly motivated by misogyny, and when that is made a specific crime by Sir Keir, a former Director of Public Prosecutions (not a lot of people know that), her detractors will be thrown in jail to take their places alongside all the "right-wingers" that Sir Keir is lining up for the clink.

We are also beginning to see the benefits of her stewardship. Inflation has plunged by 0.1 per cent. Growth, which she says is her number one priority, has soared by 0.1 per cent.

(The above paragraph was contributed by StarmerBot AI Services).

She has also introduced, or rather re-introduced, the idea of spite taxes which raise relatively little money, e.g. the non-dom crackdown on Rishi Sunak's wife, the massive hike in air duty on private jet flights, clobbering of private schools, death raids on farming assets, and so on.

Be careful what you say. It's not a good idea to get the wrong side of "Rachel from accounts," as Nigel Farage dismissively calls her.

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I am surely not alone in being surprised so many homes in California are made of wood when there is such a risk from wild fires.

America is one of the few places in the world in which wood is the dominant material in new-home construction. Around a billion trees are planted annually there. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and so help in the fight against climate change.

There are various reasons that they use wood, including that it is widely available, less expensive, suitable for earthquake zones, and people with homes made of wood pay less property tax. Also, Californians simply like homes made of wood.

Clearly there is going to have to be some deep thinking about the correct way to rebuild after this disaster. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was so devastating not just because of the earthquake itself, but because of the fires which burned uncontrollably for three days and wiped out much of the centre of the city.

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It seems Donald Trump is leaving a peace dividend legacy even before entering office. 

Whatever part he played in it, the timing of the Gaza peace deal is surely not a coincidence. He also promised to end the war in Ukraine "in 24 hours." That will prove a typical bit of Trumpian hyperbole, but if he does end the Ukraine war as well, he will have saved thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of lives.