This article was not written by a computer using AI. If it had, you probably wouldn’t have noticed, except that the language would have been crisper and more consistent and my point would have been stated at the beginning as a thesis, instead of at the end as a conclusion. The truth, however, is that when I stop writing, or get cancelled, my editor will be able to replace me with a neat program. (Since I don’t write for money I won’t mind, though I will miss the public adoration and acclaim.)

I read about one such AI-enabled system recently, in a New Yorker article by Stephen Marche about Sudowrite. It can take a paragraph you write, or a few stanzas of a poem you compose, and expand it as much as you want. Using AI, it crafts prose identical to yours. Marche submitted a few samples, including one where he used the first paragraph of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and the results were fascinating.