The AI revolution is moving into its third wave: Currently, most of the AI out there falls into a narrow category, highly specialized systems that are very good at performing specific and well designed tasks, but unable to do much more. Enter the Third Wave of AI, where programs act as tools that are excellent at perceiving, learning, reasoning and are gaining the ability to generalize — essentially becoming more human, in a way, writes Scott Jones in Medium.

Case study: Sudowrite. A program transcending the barrier between the Second and Third Wave, which has caught the eye of authors using Amazon Kindle’s e-publishing platforms, reports the Verge. Sudowrite is an AI writing program built on Open AI’s language model, GPT-3. Once fed a text or prompt, GPT-3 programs adjust their randomized mathematical parameters to predict the next words, paragraphs, or whole chapters. Previous iterations of the program were used to generate company emails or marketing copy, but Sudowrite is designed for fiction. Its creators, Amit Gupta and James Yu, are both writers themselves and they fed Sudowrite plot twists and novel synopses, which while apt for producing short-length prose, struggles to evade certain genre cliches.

It’s something, but it’s not exactly flawless: Sudowrite can be described as “prompt programming,” and still requires human input to produce output based on statistical patterns. When overfed, Sudowrite produces “hallucinations,” ridiculous and long-winded descriptions — which are pretty entertaining in themselves. But it can be manipulated by its users to generate entire books with meaningful narrative frameworks.

Great for authors: Amazon Kindle’s e-publishing platform is dominated by authors churning out short fantasy stories in nine-week stints. Placed within niche microgenres, like “cozy paranormal mystery” or “mermaid young adult fantasy,” the works are often presented in installments, teasing out future plots and characters to keep readers dedicated. Due to the rate of production required in order to be commercially successful on the platform, some see Sudowrite as a helping hand that can speed up the process: Sketch out character descriptions, tighten up plot lines, and provide a way to push through writer’s block.

And for the commercially minded: Darby Rollins, coordinator of The AI Author Workshop, sees Jasper.ai (similar to Sudowrite) as a tool to create “the minimum viable book” — the cornerstone around which an individual can base their personal marketing strategy. Generate a book, ideally oriented around often-Googled questions that will show up in searches, and suddenly “now you are a thought leader, you’re an expert, you’re an authority, you have more credibility on a topic because you have a book in your hand,” quotes The Verge.

There’s a capability overhang when it comes to what we use AI for: As AI develops and enters the mainstream, the capability overhang (what we don’t know that AI can do, or haven’t even thought to ask for) will be minimized as new minds harness it for different means. As the brain usage of AI further reaches its potential, ethical, legal and business issues raised by AI questions are likely to include considerations of AI rights, as one program called for in an AI-written Guardian article in 2020.

Not all cultures use or think of AI in the same ways: While Western acceptance and desire to incorporate AI into our lives is largely determined by its ability to enter society as a form of manpower, the Japanese embrace of AI places it in the role of equal or friend, according to Japan Policy Forum. Take aibo, a robotic dog designed and manufactured by Sony that grows every day and acquires its own identity, dependent on its living environment and relationship with people. Aibo has no real purpose — it doesn’t clean or tell the time. For its owners, aibo is not a robot but a companion. The same is unlikely to be said about Siri or Alexa.