A recently released AI program that generates hyper-realistic writing has become a powerful tool for storytelling, hinting at a new genre of computer-aided creativity. What's happening: Inventive programmers are using it to generate poetry, interactive text adventures, and even irreverent new prompts for the popular game Cards Against Humanity. The big picture: AI-written text is reaching new levels of realism -- so much so that when scientists at OpenAI released a groundbreaking text generator earlier this year, they warned of potential dangers from mass-produced fake news. The risks are still present, but recent projects demonstrate the creative upsides. How it works: The OpenAI language model is a bit like autocomplete: Based on an enormous amount of human writing, it predicts the best words to generate next.

Please invite your friends and colleagues to join the conversation and let me know what you think, and what we're missing. Just reply to this email, or email steve@axios.com. Let's dive right in with a question: 1 big idea: Could robots make us even more polarized? Sam Jayne / Axios Over the last decade or so, we've seen ordinarily apolitical topics polarize us into angry opposing mobs, among them vaccines, atmospheric gases and Russia. When there has been a super-strong view one way or another, it's been sucked into the hothouse and associated with an ideology.