How to respond to climate change, if you are an algorithm

THE ECONOMIST'S Open Future essay competition winner was announced in September, beating nearly 2,400 entries from over 110 countries. But how might artificial intelligence tackle the question? Specifically, we fed the essay question and the 58-word description through a natural-language processing algorithm called GPT-2, released publicly in February by OpenAI, a group working on AI research and ethics, based in San Francisco. The result was six roughly 400-word texts. We took the larger parts of three of them and placed them one after another with no other editing.