Empathy machines: what will happen when robots learn to write film scripts?

AI is on the march in the movie industry - but what would an android-written film actually look like? And will it be any good?

A few years ago I moved to San Francisco, and almost everybody I met there immediately told me they were working on a startup. These startups all had the same innocent names - Swoon, Flow, Maker - and the same dreadful mission: to build AIs that automated some unfortunate human's job. I always responded by pitching my own startup, Create. Create would build an AI that automated the creation of startups.

The tech bros never cared for my joke, but I did. In fact, I cared for it so much that I eventually began a novel about an android who wanted to become a screenwriter. It seemed an intriguingly comic premise, because unlike everybody else's job, my job was clearly far too human to ever actually be automated.