The first 'computer-generated' musical isn't very good

I spent a reasonable portion of last year digging into neural networks and machine learning, wondering if and when computers were going to take my job. So when news broke of the "computer-generated musical" Beyond the Fence hitting London's West End, I was intrigued. After waiting for a couple of months, I headed to a performance of the show's limited run, but I left the theater unmoved. Computers can help write a musical, it seems, but they can't yet write a good one. "What if there was a wounded soldier who had to learn how to understand a child in order to find true love?" But before you can understand why it doesn't work and how the musical falls short, you need to understand how and why it was made.