A friend alerted me to this article in NYT by Shelley Podolny:

‘Consider the opening sentences of these two sports pieces: “Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.” “The University of Michigan baseball team used a four-run fifth inning to salvage the final game in its three-game weekend series with Iowa, winning 7-5 on Saturday afternoon (April 24) at the Wilpon Baseball Complex, home of historic Ray Fisher Stadium.” If you can’t tell which was written by a human, you’re not alone. According to a study conducted by Christer Clerwall of Karlstad University in Sweden and published in Journalism Practice, when presented with sports stories not unlike these, study respondents couldn’t tell the difference. (Machine first, human second, in our example, by the way.)’

Read the article here.

Coetzee suggests in “The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” that lots of therapy could have been done by machines.
Still, he believes that we need a human being for intimacy. But it is conceivable that things will shift, that for spiritual growth we will talk to a machine instead of a human being.

A definition of artificial intelligence: a machine that understands the concept of spiritual growth.