Imagine a situation: you are the scientist who wants to create a robot using unsupervised learning. At first, you want him to be smart, so you spend two weeks putting in all the data. Then, you ask him to write articles about global warming in physical copy. It understands everything now so what it needs to do is to write and write and write. You keep it working and go to eat your dinner.

Tom Gerencer's book Intergalactic Refrigerator Repairmen Seldom Carry Cash features 19 pieces of humorous science fiction. Gerencer selected the stories out of literally hundreds that he's written over the past two decades. "If you go to Walmart, and you go into the section with the big Tupperware bins that you can put clothes and stuff in, I would just write and write and write, and fill a notebook with short stories--or fragments of short stories--and then I would put them into the bin, and then I would fill another notebook and put that in the bin, and fill another notebook, and now I have five or six bins in the basement, and there are several bins that I lost at some point," Gerencer says in Episode 473 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It is certainly an avalanche of words." With titles like "Trailer Trash Savior" and "Apocalyptic Nostrils of the Moon," you might expect the stories to be light-hearted, but Gerencer's work also contains a dark streak of existential angst, frequently dealing with questions such as: How can we be happy?

GPT-3, the latest incarnation of artificially intelligent natural-language systems, knows how to write -- and write and write and write. For a taste of what it can (and cannot) do, here are three examples of its verbosity. In each case, we gave the system a short prompt (in italics) and let it roll. First we asked it to write about itself. Then, playing off a suggestion from a start-up called Sudowrite, which has spent months testing GPT-3, we asked the system to write a Modern Love column.