Read the fifth part of the article. Which of the underlined modal verbs is closest in meaning to the modal verb ‘may’ in the context of the text?

Read the fifth part of the article. Which of the underlined modal verbs is closest in meaning to the modal verb ‘may’ in the context of the text?

Speaking of fresh and reliable material, what happens when more and more of the material found online is generated by artificial intelligence? Last week, Google and Microsoft both announced a suite of A.I. tools for office workers, with applications that can compose new e-mails, reports, and slide decks or summarize existing ones. Similar tools must soon be invading other aspects of our digital lives. When the bot is generating material that workers used to produce, it will become difficult to determine which pieces of content in your in-box are meaningful; there will be no guarantee that any human labor or thought went into a given e-mail or report. We are all already bombarded by spam, mostly of a man-made variety. This will be a new kind of A.I.-generated spam on an unprecedented scale, much of it difficult to distinguish from content made by humans. Sooner than we think, content mills may be using A.I. to generate full articles, publicists may be using it to write press releases, and cooking sites might use it to devise recipes. These companies had better provide help for people to navigate the glut, but media companies will have fewer resources to devote to serving that need. In such a scenario, A.I. could solve the very problem that it creates: eventually, if tools like Bing A.I. cause the well of original material online to run dry, all that will be left is self-referential bots, dredging up a generic set of answers that machines created in the first place.