How exactly were you able to infer that they were lying and were instead using a Markov chain from a few snippets of dialogue?
Second, the concept of AI is so fragmented, varied, and overloaded, that who's really to say Markov text generation isn't a simple AI?
And TBH, there's not much difference between Markov chains and most AI and machine learning algorithms. The math's a little different, but they're almost all based on probability and statistics (and sometimes searching) and none of them really understand anything.
It's actually pretty standard and not particularly innovative, technically, in that you can google already existing tutorials on exactly how to do that (even in Keras - forget lower level stuff).
At any rate, this doesn't work well, typically. I'm sure they generated a bunch of sample sequences and cherry picked ones that made even a little sense for inclusion in their script.
A large amount of AI-generated text just swaps in the source dataset, generates the text, calls it AI, and gets many blog posts written about "artificial creativity."
https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-intelligence/adventur...
https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-intelligence/adventur...
Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works.
For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run a single command to process the text document, and wait. Why this is described as a "...long short-term-memory recursive machine-learning algorithm" probably has to do with the fact that Ars has their hand in promoting these short films.