Is AI finally closing in on human intelligence?

London — It can churn out e-mails, computer code, internet ads, plot lines for video games, guitar riffs and suggestions for Halloween costumes. It can write disarmingly plausible poems in the spirit of Emily Dickinson, prose in the style of Ernest Hemingway and even, if so instructed, an imaginary conversation between Dickinson and Hemingway.

The possibilities seem almost endless. So when I had the opportunity to interact with GPT-3, a new language-generation model that has caused a sensation in the artificial intelligence (AI) world over the past few months, I enlisted its help in drafting myself a new biography, infused with the spirit of hero Luke Skywalker...