While Microsoft's Tay was being racist, an AI entered a writing contest -- and nearly won

We've covered robot writers before, but to date it has never been much of a concern for actual writers. Robots just aren't that good at doing what we do; although Microsoft's'Tay' did prove to be pretty great at going from zero to off-the-rails after dealing with some nasty Twitter comments -- something any writer can relate to. Until now, "robot writers" -- artificial intelligence programs taught to write -- were mainly only good at penning quick stories based on data-heavy reports. Box scores, stock reports, and the like were basically all the programs were capable of doing well. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech.