This article was not written by AI, but my guess is that within a short period of time, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. From a lawyer who has spent a good part of the last two decades teaching legal analysis and writing, that statement’s either a yellow or a white flag. Generative AI has the potential to retire a lot of us.

For those who’ve missed the breathless coverage given this development recently, several companies now are releasing beta versions of programs that will scan the universe of available data and write e-mails, poems, essays, memos, arguments, letters and other forms of prose in the voice of a human author in a few seconds. They can even adjust their output in response to a specific request such as ”write me a poem in Elizabethan English in rhyming quatrains” or “write me a three-page essay in the voice of a 13 year-old boy”. It’s been reported that some media companies are already using such services to produce the first draft of articles and newsletters.