The perfect words for any card — written by AI, felt by the person who receives it

I'll be honest with you — I'm not a natural poet. I never have been. When a card needed something personal and heartfelt, I'd stare at a blank page for ten minutes and end up writing something perfectly adequate and completely forgettable.

AI changed that for me completely. And it's now one of the things I use most often, and one of the things I enjoy demonstrating most, because the reaction it produces is almost always the same: That's exactly what I wanted to say.

Any occasion, any tone, any person

The range of occasions where a personal verse makes all the difference is enormous. I've used AI to write verses for birthdays — from a cheeky limerick for a friend turning fifty to something genuinely moving for an elderly parent. Weddings, anniversaries, new babies, retirement, passing a driving test, Valentine's Day, Christmas. And yes, funerals too — perhaps the hardest words of all to find, and the ones where getting it right matters most.

The key is to tell AI who the person is. Not just their name — but a little about them. What makes them them. Something that's happened recently in their life. A shared memory, an in-joke, something they're going through right now. The more you tell it, the more the verse will feel as though it could only ever have been written for that one person.

A real example — word for word

Here's the kind of thing I might type for a friend's birthday:

"Please write a short, warm and slightly funny verse for my friend Margaret's 70th birthday. She's just retired after 40 years as a nurse, she loves her garden, and she's recently taken up wild swimming. Make it rhyme and keep it to about eight lines."

What comes back will reference the nursing career, the garden, possibly the cold water — and it will rhyme properly and read beautifully. You may want to tweak a word or two to make it sound more like you. But the heavy lifting is done.

Topical and personal — all at once

One thing I particularly love about this is that you can weave in something completely current. If your sister has just got a new job, moved house, had a difficult year, or finally booked that holiday she's been talking about for years — you can put that in. AI will work it into the verse naturally, so it reads as though you sat down and thought about her specifically. Because in a sense, you did.

For a funeral or a loss, the same principle applies. Tell AI about the person — what they meant to you, a memory you carry, the kind of person they were. What comes back can be genuinely beautiful, and writing it that way can itself be a quiet comfort.

The occasions it works for

To give you a sense of the range — I've seen wonderful AI verses written for birthdays of every age, Christmas and New Year, wedding days and anniversaries, new babies and christenings, retirement, passing a driving test (that one always raises a laugh at my sessions), Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day, get well soon cards, thank-you notes, and tributes for those we've lost.

There is no occasion too big or too small. If the moment matters, the words matter — and AI will help you find them.

Making a picture to go with it

If you'd like to go a step further, an AI image tool can create a beautiful illustration to print alongside your verse — turning a card into something genuinely special.

For a birthday, you might describe something personal to them. For a wedding, a scene that reflects the couple. For a new baby, something soft and gentle. Here's an example of what you might type into an image tool like Adobe Firefly or the image generator in ChatGPT:

"A beautiful watercolour-style illustration of a cottage garden in full bloom on a summer evening, with a pair of wellies by the door and a trowel resting against a flowerpot. Warm, peaceful and slightly nostalgic."

Print the verse on one side and the picture on the other, or combine them on a single sheet. What you end up with is a card that no shop could ever sell — because it was made for one person, and one person only.

Something I come back to again and again

Of everything AI has made easier in my life, this is the one I reach for most regularly. There is always an occasion coming up. There is always someone worth saying something real to. And now, finding the right words takes about two minutes instead of never quite happening at all.

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