"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
for 17 March 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Unlike commerce, communication, and hot lesbo action, good writing hasn't always been well served by the information age. And why should it? The sublimities of belles-lettres are far too subtle for the crude mechanisms of AI bots.

Or are they? CNN recently reported that a new program developed by the Minds and Machines Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute can convincingly impersonate an author.

Brutus, as the application is called, currently specializes in tales of betrayal and deception in academic settings. But Brutus' next generation is moving into new territory. Is the future of literature safe? Or will tomorrow's authors be reduced to quaint hobbyists, spinning away at their looms in a literary version of Colonial Williamsburg? The following selection of new AI-powered efforts may provide some clues.

Suck has instructed our own supercomputer, the Pisces 400, to take some of today's most-loved genres, reduce them to their mathematical essentials, and generate working imitations. Here's what we got....