John, I believe they're programs written by people. Whether they
   are of high quality of not depends on a lot of factors. I work
   with AI frequently; I ran every writing I could find of mine
   through one to help it automatically classify my writings into
   their Dewey Decimal equivalents to help me understand my own
   brain a little better.

   But I'm not a devotee of the singularity. I see it as a nice
   idea but perhaps it's a geographical thing:

   You're in Seattle. I have friends in Seattle and the singularity
   is all the buzz, so much so that's almost a veritable fact.

   But I'm in Florida. I was raised in NJ. While I had a brief
   stint with liberal hippie-style idealism at Hampshire College in
   Amherst, MA for a couple of years, I never had the luxury of
   believing a "pure anything". Especially New Jersey. Your
   idealism gets shoved out of you via intense debates, where
   everybody is playing devil's advocate with everybody else and
   oddly enough, ends up coming to a consensus at the end.

   Never had the opportunity to be in an idealistic community
   environment, at least, not for long, sans a short monastery stay
   in my mid 20s. That was nice. Didn't really believe it then
   either, but I learned a lot about interspective psychology in
   the process.

   "I guess we disagree about the existence of recursively self
   improving systems. Honestly, every other group I belong to or
   admin is an AI group, so I guess I came to this one looking for
   other stuff."