Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential proclamations, then took a variety of freelance writing jobs. One of these involved churning out business letters--he calls it freelance ghostwriting. The letters were all pretty much the same, so he figured out an algorithm that would generate form letters, using a few samples as a database. The algorithm jumbled up paragraphs and lines following certain templates, then reassembled them to produce business letters, similar but each varying in style, saving him the job of starting anew each time. He thought he was on to something new but soon found out that this was a well-explored area.

Today's computers compose music that sounds'more Bach than Bach', turn photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even write screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Join Arthur I Miller on a tour of creativity in the age of machines, taking us inside the world of artists and computer scientists who are working on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. We will meet researchers who have, among much else, unleashed an artificial neural network to create a nightmarish, multi-eyed dog-cat; taught AI to imagine; developed a robot that improvises jazz; and scripted and composed the world's first computer-created musical. And we will encounter machines that have defeated grand masters at chess and Go. The great question Arthur will ask is: will machines one day overtake humans completely?

With this quite extraordinary book Arthur Miller has produced an essential, readable, and highly intelligent account of the manner in which machines can―and surely soon will―become involved in the process of creativity. In art, poetry, music, and thinking, computers are now teetering on the brink of true consciousness with implications both tantalizing and terrifying, as this necessary book so eloquently illustrates.