OK, carry on talking among yourselves; the philosophy world seems as cliquey as any other.

A brief comment on Brett's remark re. Duchamp: Duchamp's urinal has been widely misunderstood and misconstrued because taken out of its context (and overrated at the same time). Duchamp was asserting the right of the artist as opposed to the curator or exhibition juror to determine what counted as art when submitted for exhibition. It was a challenge to fellow judges of the panel he was on for a 1917 New York exhibition, and for that purpose could have been anything at all. He wasn't making an ontological statement on art or artworks that would apply beyond those circumstances. There is the further definitional problem in who counts as 'an artist' - anyone who proclaims themself to be one? The only way to resolve that circularity is by making the claim dependent on having an existing reputation as an artist, as Duchamp had - without that, his gesture would have carried no weight except for his judging role, which itself depended on his standing as an artist.
If there is a relevance here to the A.I./literature debate, it lies in this same circularity of defining what constitutes a 'literary' text, and by whom.

Maybe the true relevance of this discussion relates not to A.I.-produced texts but to the poststructuralist literary Theorists' argument that all literary texts are purely derived from preceding texts, as all linguistic statements are articulated from the pre-existing language; so literary texts might just as well be generated by computer programmes as by writers. That was part of the ideological anti-humanist stance of the poststructuralists, once fashionable although now sliding into the old-fashioned.

Just come to this, as only joined a few weeks ago. As a practising writer, I would like to add a couple of points. As has been argued here already, Artificial Intelligence is a programme, set up by human intelligence, so dependent on the initial criteria set by human agency. Computer programmes have been long used in writing and musical composition, particularly to generate randomness (in, for example, Harrison Birtwistle's music), but as such, are a tool, not a source of creativity.
The more important point is that a great deal of literature is already produced by second-level creativity even though written by humans, in being written to formulae - almost all 'literary fiction' published today is generated by Creative Writing course graduates following templates or simply recycling current tropes. To be be genuinely creative, literature has to be self-reflexive to the extent of undermining its own status as 'literature', pointing back to the world from a self-declared artifice. It's difficult to believe programmed computers would develop that self-reflexivity.

Very sad to hear this. Magee was very important to me, firstly by introducing me to the work of Karl Popper in a Sunday Times magazine article relating to his Fontana Modern Masters book on Popper (1973) - I think it was Magee who wrote the S.T. article, but possibly not. And around the same time, though I was unaware of them, a series of BBC radio interviews over the winter of 1970-71, later published in book form by Secker & Warburg in 1971, republished in pb. by OUP in 1986, as "Modern British Philosophy" - the version I have. I was always slightly puzzled, and disappointed, when he stood for Parliament - it seemed a diminishment, a waste of his talents somehow. Maybe the ability to sum up a philosophical position with clarity is as important as making original contributions. He will be missed.