Bill Potts, the first openly-gay companion played by

His scenes depicting the streets and pubs of north-west England attracted comparisons with LS Lowry.An immersive art installation that invites people to "disappear" inside a mirrored box to understand life with chronic fatigue syndrome, is coming to the West Country.

Created by Bristol artist Alison Larkman, Mirrorbox plays messages from ME and long Covid patients explaining why a particular location is special to them, and why their condition means they cannot be there themselves.Ms Larkman, who has ME, said the concept came from "the idea of taking up space, of being seen and heard but also being invisible at the same time".The initiative, titled 'I would be here if I could', has seen the Mirrorbox travel all over the country and it will be in Bristol and Glastonbury in the coming weeks.

ME causes extreme tiredness and can be so severe that patients are left bed-bound and unable to complete even simple tasks.Other symptoms include problems with memory and concentration, muscle and joint pain, dizziness and sensitivity to light and sound.

When her illness is at its worst, Ms Larkman can only stay awake for three-hour windows.

"Your imagination is huge and you can lay in bed and travel to all sorts of places and think about things whereas you can't do them," she said.A fear of machines becoming conscious and posing a threat to humans is explored in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the HAL 9000 computer attacks astronauts onboard its spaceship. And in the final Mission Impossible film, which has just been released, the world is threatened by a powerful rogue AI, described by one character as a "self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite".

But quite recently, in the real world there has been a rapid tipping point in thinking on machine consciousness, where credible voices have become concerned that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction.The sudden shift has been prompted by the success of so-called large language models (LLMs), which can be accessed through apps on our phones such as Gemini and Chat GPT. The ability of the latest generation of LLMs to have plausible, free-flowing conversations has surprised even their designers and some of the leading experts in the field.

There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious.Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism".