I'd say generating an entire coherent essay like this would constitute a solid pass of the Turing test. I don't think we're that close to that yet (or alternately the singularity is right around the corner, because you could feed that same bot a corpus of AI papers and have it write new publishable ones.)
But it should be possible to separately train a neural network on basic knowledge, so it can generate a stream of ideas. Then use GPT-2 to generate a sentence or paragraph, following those guidelines.
Just like we humans: we first think of what we want to say (a few points about X, first Y, don't forget Z). Then turn those rough ideas into fully-formed sentences.
Maybe it's worth a try, in order to advance science. But, generally, I think that text synthesis ultimately is one of those problems that we really cannot hope to solve before we've also solved the problem of creating full blown artificial general intelligence. When we have a system that actually understands both the world and the human beings in it, then we can probably also have a system capable of writing intelligent essays. Before that, we'd just be fiddling with different degrees of extremely stupid, I think.
