A mischievous friend recently asked whether I would mind if he tasked one of the artificial intelligence (AI) utilities to mimic my writing about play. He had been pestering me to investigate the naughty adult game Cards Against Humanity. We had played it one evening with our partners and two other couples with hilarious results.

He wanted to know whether we could tell the difference between robot writing and the real thing.

So, yes, great question, I was game to play his game. After all, AI has revolutionized endeavors as varied as customer service and weather forecasting. These programs are so smart that they bested Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy champion, in a trivia contest. Even the composition you are reading now has been eased by machine intelligence that helped cut and paste text, correct word agreement, and identify synonyms.

The deep-fake results of the chatbot challenge rang with an uncanny familiarity. I knew of the trouble that editors of scientific journals have encountered with unoriginal computer-generated texts. Still. Maybe the machine could save me some trouble.

But are we at ease with these revolutions?

On the one hand, speculative fiction has delivered a succession of cyborgs and rogue computers, a cohort spearheaded by HAL 2000, the murderous AI. Arthur C. Clarke’s imagination was filled with awful warning. On the other hand, futurists see a great big, beautiful tomorrow. Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist and inventor, predicts that the “convergent, exponential technological trends are leading to a transition that will be utterly transformative for humanity.” Not the least of these will be the........

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