Fascinating piece by Nicholas Carr on GPT-3, an AI tool for generating text. It has been fed mountains of human-written text and, in turn, has generated some startling text of its own. Carr:

It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.