India, Feb. 13 -- I did what millions now do. I generated a few images using Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude. Clean lines. Good lighting. Slightly stylised. To me, they looked fine. For validation, I dropped them into our four-member family WhatsApp group - the informal civic square of the Indian household, where news, politics, jokes and judgments circulate with equal velocity.

My 13-year-old daughter responded instantly: "It looks ugly."

It wasn't the aesthetic she objected to. It was the method. The images had been created by artificial intelligence (AI). She had read, she said, about the water consumption of data centres and the energy demands of training large models. Ironically, I had argued here last week that Big Tech must not be all...