Welcoming our new robot author overlords

Ignoring everything they've seen throughout the Terminator franchise, a group of Japanese researchers have come up with a computer that writes short stories… and it's actually produced a piece of work that got through the first round of a literary competition. Creative writing as a manufactured commodity – that's a scary thought, but perhaps it's inevitable. Companies love automation: feed a few instructions in one end and get a finished product out of the other. It's always been a popular notion that there are only a handful of stories and that everything written is a variation on those; if that's true then why can't a machine just write a half decent story? And does it even have to be half-decent to sell by the thousands?