Practitioners in the arts labour under the misapprehension that the human factor of creativity would shield them from the depredations of artificial intelligence. It is assumed that like machines freed us from physical labour, machine intelligence would rid us of intellectual chores. They would put production line workers, bookkeepers, bank tellers and inventory managers out of work, but novelists and artists, and the marketing networks which have developed around their products, would be unharmed. A computer at Stanford which has digested the complete works of Shakespeare does almost passable knockoffs. In 2018, a neural network went on a journey across America and wrote a digital equivalent of Jack Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road.