According to an old fable, if you sat a monkey at a keyboard and gave it enough time, it would eventually type out the entire works of Shakespeare. The idea behind the thought experiment is a simple one, but it is an outdated way of thinking about artificial intelligence (AI). For example, consider the predictive text function on a phone -- unlike the hypothetical monkey, it does not randomly generate suggested words, but detects patterns in the way we write to select the likeliest options. "We've gone from predicting the next letters in a word to predicting the next word to being able to autogenerate whole sentences, and sometimes whole articles," Adelaide-based AI researcher, Dr John Flackett, said. Last year, Google launched Smart Compose for Gmail users which anticipates potential endings to sentences as you type them out, with the company promising it would "save you time".