Last Christmas Eve, NewsBreak, a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States, published an alarming piece about a small town shooting. It was headlined "Christmas Day Tragedy Strikes Bridgeton, New Jersey Amid Rising Gun Violence in Small Towns." The problem was, no such shooting took place. The Bridgeton police department posted a statement on Facebook on Dec. 27 dismissing the article -- produced using AI technology -- as "entirely false."

Is it possible to use AI to write fiction? The following article was written solely with an artificial intelligence content writer. It's certainly not ready to replace a human writer, even for non-fiction posts like this, but where will it be in five or ten years? When I first started researching the topic, I assumed there was absolutely no way that AI could be used to write a novel. How could an AI, a machine designed to do one thing and one thing only, be able to write an entire novel?

A few years ago this month, Portland, Oregon artist Darius Kazemi watched a flood of tweets from would-be novelists. November is National Novel Writing Month, a time when people hunker down to churn out 50,000 words in a span of weeks. To Kazemi, a computational artist whose preferred medium is the Twitter bot, the idea sounded mildly tortuous. "I was thinking I would never do that," he says. "But if a computer could do it for me, I'd give it a shot."

It was a dark, overcast day, with clouds hovering low. The room was kept at the most appropriate temperatures and humidity, as usual. Yoko sat on a couch in an untidy manner, killing time with a silly game. But she would not talk to me. So begins a short story titled "A day when a computer writes fiction."

Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction -- and the results were unexpectedly haunting. SEE ALSO: Japanese team helps A.I. program pass first round of novel writing contest The paper, first reported by Quartz, details Google's method, which involved using thousands of romance novels and other works of fiction to "train" the AI. The company then fed the model two sentences to serve as a starting point and endpoint and tasked it with generating transition sentences in between. While some of the results were a bit nonsensical, others were surprisingly haunting (the researchers concede the source material is "often rather dramatic.")