We have often mused that the world is divided into two groups of people. Those who sympathised with Joaquin Phoenix when he fell in love with the raspy disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson’s artificial intelligence home assistant in Her, and those who… didn’t.

Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for the Sunday Times, is probably in the camp of the former, if his most recent piece for the newspaper is anything to go by. The critic posed for Ai-Da, a female robot artist, at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford recently and though he didn’t set much store by her creativity – “she’s no Frida Kahlo,” he wrote – he was impressed by her, erm, physical assets.

“Ai-Da looks at me through those mysterious hazel eyes of hers and winks a playful wink,” Januszczak wrote. “‘You’re very beautiful,’ I splutter. ‘Thank… you,’ she whispers back.”

Not even a robot woman is safe from the male gaze