While the purpose of the study was not to prove that AI systems are capable of replacing humans in creative roles, it raises philosophical questions about the characteristics that are unique to humans, says Simone Grassini, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway, who co-led the research. "We've shown that in the past few years, technology has taken a very big leap forward when we talk about imitating human behavior," he says. "These models are continuously evolving." Proving that machines can perform well in tasks designed for measuring creativity in humans doesn't demonstrate that they're capable of anything approaching original thought, says Ryan Burnell, a senior research associate at the Alan Turing Institute, who was not involved with the research. The chatbots that were tested are "black boxes," meaning that we don't know exactly what data they were trained on, or how they generate their responses, he says.

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all." -- Luis Buñuel Portolés, Filmmaker Every year, hundreds of millions of people experience the pain of a failing memory. The reasons are many: traumatic brain injury, which haunts a disturbingly high number of veterans and football players; stroke or Alzheimer's disease, which often plagues the elderly; or even normal brain aging, which inevitably touches us all. Memory loss seems to be inescapable. But one maverick neuroscientist is working hard on an electronic cure.