The world's most prolific writer is a Chinese algorithm

Load up the homepage for e-commerce giant, Alibaba – a wholesale shopping site that's more or less China's answer to eBay – and you'll find images and descriptions of anything you could wish to buy, from kitchen sinks to luxury yachts. Every item has a short headline, but most are little more than lists of keywords: hand-picked search terms to ensure this USB phone charger or that pair of flame-resistant overalls float to the top in a sea of thousands upon thousands of similar items. It sounds simple, but there's an art to this copywriting. Yet Alibaba recently revealed that it is training an artificial intelligence to generate these item descriptions automatically – and they're not the only ones. Over the last few decades AIs have been taught to compose music, paint pictures and write (bad) poems. "Generative bots are the new chatbot," says Jun Wang at University College London.