Could AI ever be as profound as Shakespeare? Should we fear it? Steve Dow talks with a number of academics and writers about artificial intelligence, where it might be leading us and whether they are prepared to embrace it creatively.

Dan Spielman in a promotional image for Tom Holloway’s new play Eliza, about the birth of AI, to be premiered by Melbourne Theatre Company in September. Photo © Jo Duck

Sixty years ago, German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum used his findings from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create his pioneering chatbot ELIZA. He named the early natural language processing computer program, created to explore communication between humans and machines, after Eliza Doolittle, the flower seller taught to speak standard English...