If you’re a writer, you might want to invest in an Artificial Intelligence program. In Japan, a collaboration between humans – specifically, Future University Hakodate professor Hitoshi Matsubara and his team – and an AI-powered computer has written a novella that was good enough to make it past the first round of the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. Fortunately, for all-human writers, it did not win.

But how long before that happens, frankly? In this case, the humans picked the plot and the gender of the characters, and gave the AI program a menu of words and sentences to choose from in order to write the novella.

The outcome was the novel The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, with sentences such as these (in English translation, made by a human):

“I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.”

Perhaps because this was Japan, 11 of the 1,450 novels submitted in the competition involved AI programs. One of the judges said he was surprised by the quality.

Here’s a play about Artificial Intelligence written by a 100 per cent human being. Reading Karel Capek’s RUR might remind us why we still need a human mind to write fiction. (Mildly appropriately, we’re asking you to read it on your Kindle.)