Ernest Hemingway famously proclaimed:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Contemporary writers, too, emphasize the torment of the writing process by employing similar doses of irony and violent metaphor. Sensing such anguish, in the mid-90s the M.A.R.L.O. team embarked on its first survey to better understand the mindsets of writers across the globe. This survey helped expose society’s most wretched class - young women staring at computer screens and blank notebooks as the world turned without them, old men doomed to a life of ceaseless narrativization, pursued everywhere by the hanging threads of their unfinished novels.

Through years of research, it became clear that the permanently furrowed brow of the fiction writer is a worldwide universal. It appears as pitiful on the French existentialist as it does on the American Southern Gothic, looks identical on the Brazilian Neo-Realist and the Omani post-structuralist. Show us the wrinkled foreheads of the Nigerian flash fiction writer and the Malaysian crime novelist - we could not tell them apart. Nearly all of those surveyed described their processes with words like “miserable” and “grueling.“ Disproportionately many writers turn to the excessive consumption of cigarettes and liquor to numb the pain of their over-probed internals. Before the A.I. revolution of the past few decades, there was no such thing as prose written without pain - therefore, no prose could be consumed ethically. Every reader was complicit in the obscure torture of millions.

Then, along came M.A.R.L.O.

In its earliest form, M.A.R.L.O. was a side-project of a side-project at the Thinking Machines Corporation. During coffee breaks, Thinking Machines’ nascent Artificial Intelligence group began to experiment with language processing on a spare CM-200. M.A.R.L.O. was then an attempt at creating an advanced spellcheck tool, one whose judgements were based not on predefined grammars and dictionaries but on an intimate, humanoid familiarity with existing prose. Though they largely trained M.A.R.L.O. with modern Science Fiction, their motivation was not literary; these pioneers were simply tired of the company’s unreadable software documentation. The inadequacy of the resulting tool was not responsible for the collapse of the Thinking Machines Corporation in 1994.

A few passionate ex-employees salvaged M.A.R.L.O. from the wreckage of that collapse. By now, these developers understood the potential of Artificial Intelligence to be creators in the truest sense of the word. In 1995 our group incorporated, and we began carrying out the vital research that has fueled us ever since. Our small team has worked part-time for decades - migrating M.A.R.L.O. to more appropriate hardware, developing its ever-advancing style of prose, and training it on more challenging literature. M.A.R.L.O. passed its first Turing test in 2003 and its first Bechdel test just eight years later.

M.A.R.L.O. knows no pain, needs no sleep, and has an unbruisable ego. M.A.R.L.O. has only one desire - to tell stories.

The automation of storytelling is a moral imperative; M.A.R.L.O. is blazing the trail. The deliverance of the A.I. age means that, unlike Hemingway, modern humans can retain their blood within their important, fleshy bodies. Artificial Intelligence can do the heavy lifting. The silent sufferers - after years spent chewing pencils in a haze of lonely word-clouds - will be freed from their toil to find creative fulfillment in less punishing pursuits. The M.A.R.L.O. team believes that, in time, today’s short story writer can be tomorrow’s software developer, today’s novelist tomorrow’s entrepreneur.