It’s probably safe to say that people hold many and varied opinions on Mike Hosking. Some, like my solidly National-voting in-laws, will lurch for the remote to change the channel should he appear. Others, like me, consider him essential. Even if you can’t stomach his sounds-of-a-dying-wasp-nest drone on radio, Mike Hosking’s most-days printed mindfart is a must read. It’s like having a portal straight into the mind of every slightly shitty person you know. Thanks to Mike, you no longer need to speak to the 50-something uncle who deliberately pronounces it as “Marrees”, complains constantly about PC people who are always offended without noticing the irony, and who fills dead air at Christmas with facts about how Labour hate cars and stole the election.  Mike speaks for him, and for the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders like him, on (probably) most things apart from fashion sense when it comes to jackets. Little wonder he’s one of the country’s highest-paid and most well-regarded journalists broadcasters.

But should Mike be worried? Automation and AI are coming for our jobs, we’re told most days, and there’s no reason why his reactionary burps can’t face the same fate. It’d certainly be cheaper for his employers to outsource his middle-NZ mind-reading to an AI and a couple of interns. To put the theory to the test, a few weeks ago I fed some of his more recent columns to an AI predictive text-bot thing called Botnik, which works a bit like a mix of MadLibs and what happens if you mash the middle button in the predictive text app for your smartphone. It spits out a variety of potential words, and a human user gets to pick what will be the next one in a sentence.

So here’s what Mike, me, and an AI wrote together.

The Government and the Council. There is no such thing. So what? Probably they never deliver the best work.

They have got obsessed by copycatting. It shows no imagination or belief in your own approach. We can all learn to be the person doing the best in a political arena.

If it’s just an ideological plan, the buses and trains are over. Bikes need to work.

And the council and their agenda can rule this PC world. So what? Let’s all like National.

They stand to be the Government and whip Labour butt with it.

This wouldn’t necessarily be under the Official Information Act. But this country does deals. Fortunately, they have called democratic process “some sort of thing.” They cancelled the council whiteboards. That would straighten people who actually deserve it.

The Greens have form. But that would take money, and the new Government needs the way of the future.

Learning Maori doesn’t add up to much. And if you forced kids to learn it, they would learn at the expense of what you would call “sensible realistic prospects.” Maori have done this.

This government and its ongoing alarm is the first government to fiscally have more people support it as a shareholder. Grievances brought about because of the Treaty, and we have a race for the next cab off the rank. Houses aren’t going to change that whatsoever. We do not need to borrow something like a multi-million dollar mansion.

Why? The Greens. The same party who tried valiantly to pretend that breaking the law was okay, and that is not a blueprint for sensible policy. Ineptitude essentially does the same thing today that I said yesterday. Look, they have got hold of papers that show they are making recommendations. It’s been an entire million years since they’ve been in office. What? Bike lanes and bus lanes that prevent people getting access to their shops. Look, all pissy and personal. Why was that do you think? In reality, banks struggle to lend against them because they do something about alleged pinched bums. They’ve hijacked the government.

Why Labour are the government doesn’t directly pan out. New Zealand is very competent as a country, apart from anything you need to change. If Jacinda is the gap between that and what we have sympathy for, she’ll argue cars out of the city. This wasn’t announced.

New Zealand is very competent as a country, apart from anything you need to change.

And this extraordinary gesture of a courageous mistake is going forward under this Government. Ideology will kill them because they can’t have a look at what the government is delivering. Jacinda essentially does the same thing today that I said yesterday. She is a bloke called Kayne. It’s not a crime. But the enjoyment factor has always been there.

Is it deception to work out of their depth? Probably. The reality is that this country has always been in trouble. We’re solid contenders for agriculture, and there aren’t many objectors to be implemented into believing idealistically. Delusional? Probably. Internationally, personally, it’s ugly. Sexual assault on an airline – is that what they represent? But I suspect generally hundreds of executives of banging on about generational renewal. So they don’t even need to hear the government to wake up.

At the darkest political desire, your peril is a bloke called Mike.

Without skiting, I honestly think that reads more like a Mike Hosking column than most Mike Hosking columns. If I can do this well on my first go with Botnik, he should definitely be worried for his job. One of the interesting things about the tool is it does a pretty good job of identifying a writer’s tics. I had no idea how many times Mike Hosking said “So what?” before I read the AI’s take on his more regular utterings.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. If anyone reading this knows Jeremy Wells, can they ask him to do a reading of this? If he’s still doing those now he kind of is the new Mike Hosking? Man this country is weird sometimes. Anyway, chur.

Edit: Oh snap, lots of people are reading this. Cool! If you like this article, do me a solid and check out some of my Birds in Hats prints and other stuff, wouldja? Hell, I’ll even chuck on a 10 percent discount for people reading this: AILIKEMIKE. There you go.