The field of artificial intelligence has never lacked for hype. Back in 1965, AI pioneer Herb Simon declared, "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do." That hasn't happened -- but there certainly have been noteworthy advances, especially with the rise of "deep learning" systems, in which programs plow through massive data sets looking for patterns, and then try to make predictions. Perhaps most famously, AIs that use deep learning can now beat the best human Go players (some years after computers bested humans at chess and Jeopardy). Mastering language has proven tougher, but a program called GPT-3, developed by OpenAI, can produce human-like text, including poetry and prose, in response to prompts.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter's night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You open a magazine to an article you've been meaning to read. The title suggested a story about a promising -- but also potentially dangerous -- new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story.