Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild, because it could be employed to create "deepfakes for text". "Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology," they said, "we are not releasing the trained model." Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?

Last week, the robots finally came for that which we humans hold most dear: Our ability to write the Great [insert country or region here] Novel. The Japan News reported, and various American outlets picked up, the news that a short novel co-written by a computer program and homo sapiens had almost won a literary prize. The prize, the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, accepts entries written by robots, though this was reportedly the first year that any such entries had been submitted. Of several submissions written with AI programs, one entry scored a remarkable victory: It made it through a single round of screening. Okay, so "nearly won," as Bustle put it, might be a slight exaggeration of how well this artificial novelist performed.