WHEN you’re trying to promote Abergavenny as a worthy contender for the UK’s Town of Culture award, it’s probably best not to rely on AI to do the heavy lifting for you.

Yet that’s exactly what Abergavenny Town Council did when they sent a digital postcard to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to help us stand out in the heavily contested cultural wars.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!

Culture can come in many forms, but anything AI-generated that tries to pass itself off as artistic is not cultural.

It’s plagiarism. It’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s promoting the AI slop that denies real artists the opportunities to use the skillsets they have spent a lifetime developing.

Above all, it’s a stain on the name of the town and could well sabotage any realistic chance we had of winning the UK Town of Culture award.

You can almost hear the judges scoffing now, “Abergavenny? Culture? Don’t you mean that town of AI grifters and cynical chancers who sent us that digital postcard travesty?”

Not that anyone at the Town Council appeared to be initially bothered at what they had sent out into the wider world to represent our town.

A spokesperson enthused, “We're delighted to announce that Abergavenny Town Council has submitted our official entry to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), celebrating the rich culture, heritage and community spirit that make our town so special."

The postcard in question is so bad it’s horrendous.

The Angel Hotel, the Town Hall, the War Memorial, the Bailey Park Bandstand, St. Mary’s, and the Castle are all lined up in a pretty little row on what presumably, judging by the stretch of nondescript and lifeless water nearby, is supposed to be the Castle Meadows.

It’s like a toddler has been asked to draw a picture of all the big and important things in Abergavenny without any sense of aesthetic or geographical grasp.

It gets worse!

The Gateway to Wales has long been compared to Rome in the sense that it is surrounded by seven hills.

On the postcard they’ve included three of those hills in the shape of the Blorenge, the Sugar Loaf, and the Skirrid.

Here’s where things turn fouler than a dead fish left out in the sun.

The hills are all completely identical and lined up in a monotonous and moronic backdrop that could only be the work of a machine programmed on patterns and not original vision.

They are the sort of hills a two-year-old would draw, but with a lot less character and expression.

Obviously, the team behind it realised anyone looking at this travesty wouldn’t know what mountain was which and have decided to put handy captions above each hill.

The is the mentality we’re dealing with!

Human history in Abergavenny stretches back thousands of years and the best we can come up with to encapsulate that is to prompt AI to create something “Abergavennyish!”

AI makes simpletons of us all. Those who use it and those who consume it are denying future generations the act of creation and the right to expression.

It’s AI, not art, it’s computerised, not human, and it’s convenience not culture, and those responsible should hang their heads in shame.