Guess What? This Mystery Story Written by Robots Is Kind of Good!

In his afterword to the short murder mystery Death of an Author, the writer Stephen Marche invokes a concept called Moravec's paradox. Hans Moravec, a robotics scientist, observed that tasks human beings find challenging, such as playing chess, are easy for computers, while many of the actions human beings effortlessly perform without conscious thought, such as perception or oriented movement through space, are extremely difficult for the machines. Moravec's paradox is a useful way to think about the surprising ways that Death of an Author, described by its publisher as a "groundbreaking experiment" in artificial intelligence, succeeds. Jacob Weisberg, the head of podcast production company Pushkin Industries (and a former Slate editor in chief), asked Marche, a journalist who writes about artificial intelligence, to make Death of an Author earlier this year. The goal was a novella whose text was to be 95 percent computer-generated.