In his afterword to the short murder mystery Death of an Author, the writer Stephen Marche invokes a concept called Moravec's paradox. Hans Moravec, a robotics scientist, observed that tasks human beings find challenging, such as playing chess, are easy for computers, while many of the actions human beings effortlessly perform without conscious thought, such as perception or oriented movement through space, are extremely difficult for the machines. Moravec's paradox is a useful way to think about the surprising ways that Death of an Author, described by its publisher as a "groundbreaking experiment" in artificial intelligence, succeeds. Jacob Weisberg, the head of podcast production company Pushkin Industries (and a former Slate editor in chief), asked Marche, a journalist who writes about artificial intelligence, to make Death of an Author earlier this year. The goal was a novella whose text was to be 95 percent computer-generated.

As a writer collective, we've had AI on the brain--from my last piece on AI companion bots to Evan's excellent essay on the AI value chain to Nathan's exploration of the infinite AI article. Every has also been building Lex, a word processor with AI baked in. I started working on this piece before we launched Lex, but testing out this tool (among others) has shaped my perspective on the role of AI writing assistants for creatives. Try it for yourself: watch the demo and sign-up to join the waitlist (Every's paid subscribers have priority access, so subscribe to skip the line). In 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin created an experimental short sci-fi film written entirely by a neural network.

Indicators that writers will need to scramble lest they find themselves replaced by a robot in coming months or years were out in full force in Q2. Those included a warning that some big news outlets are simply dying to replace writers with robots. Says Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University: "Let me introduce you to the two most bottom line-obsessed newspaper publishers in the United States: Alden Global Capital and Gannett. "If they could, they'd unleash the algorithms to cover everything up-to-and-including city council meetings, mayoral speeches and development proposals. "And if they could figure-out how to program the robots to write human-interest stories and investigative reports, well, they'd do that too."

It appears we may not be ready to turn over important news curation duties to AI-driven editors, according to an opinion piece in Analytics India. Case in point: Trusting AI to get the story right resulted in a major gaffe at AI-driven MSN News last week, observes Analytics India writer Ram Sugar. The problem: MSN's AI ran the wrong photo along with a piece on racism, which it curated from another online news source. That triggered charges from the misidentified source -- Jade Thirwall -- that the AI software itself was plagued by racist programming. Observes Sugar: "Having a completely automated information curator cannot be justified -- unless some organization wants to hide behind the veil of AI by shifting the blame to a non-human entity."