Have you ever wanted to pick the brains of Sir Isaac Newton, Mary Shelley, or Benjamin Franklin? Well now you can (kinda), thanks to a new experiment by magician and novelist Andrew Mayne. The project — called AI|Writer — uses OpenAI’s new text generator API to create simulated conversations with virtual historical figures. The system first works out the purpose of the message and the intended recipient by searching for patterns in the text. It then uses the API‘s internal knowledge of that person to guess how they would respond in their written voice. The digitized characters can answer questions about their work, explain…

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