The most impressive imitation machine ever built: How this new AI technology is closing in on human intelligence

It can churn out emails, computer code, internet ads, plotlines for video games, guitar riffs and suggestions for Halloween costumes. It can write disarmingly plausible poems in the spirit of Emily Dickinson, prose in the style of Ernest Hemingway and even, if so instructed, an imaginary conversation between Dickinson and Hemingway. The possibilities seem almost endless. So when I had the opportunity to interact with GPT-3, a new language-generation model that has caused a sensation in the artificial intelligence world over the past few months, I enlisted its help in drafting myself a new biography, infused with the spirit of hero Luke Skywalker. Trained on pretty much all the text accessible on the internet, GPT-3 is remarkable for its speed, scale and versatility.