StatsMonkey is a program created by researchers from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Nothwestern University in 2009. Even then, I was able to write sports chronicles such as the one on the October 11, 2009 game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Red Boston Socks in the first round of the American League play-off.
No one would have been able to suspect that this chronicle was not written by a human journalist. However, StatsMonkey was still a rudimentary system: Quill , a new artificial intelligence (AI) system conceived by the same researchers two years later, was capable of writing a story in 30 seconds. Since 2015, the Chinese company Tencent has been writing information about business and the economy with an AI that is capable of writing a 916-word story in just 60 seconds. According to Steven Levy , editor of Wired magazine, within 15 years 90% of all the articles we read in the press will be written by algorithms.
In the field of literature, an AI has reached the second phase of the selection process for a national literary award, and Simon Colton , professor of creative computing at the University of London, has been working on Writing Fool, which writes poems in a fairly solvent.
Every time we are going to witness more complex and interesting texts written by machines, especially as a result of the development of machine learning , through the use of neural networks (which uses the same basic principles of the human brain). Sunspring, for example, is a short whose script has been written by a neural network.
For this reason, we are beginning to attend the troubled issue of elucidating to whom all these texts conceived by machines belong. A court in Shenzhen , a Chinese city that has often been compared to California’s Silicon Valley, has already determined that “a work generated by an AI is qualified to be protected by copyright ” after Tencent, creator of the author of the text, Dreamwriter , denounced Shanghai Yingxun Technology Company for copying one of their articles.
The text was a report from the Shanghai Stock Exchange of August 20, 2018, but according to the court, “the form of expression of the article conforms to the requirements of the written work and the content shows the selection, analysis and judgment of the information and relevant data of the stock market “.
This sentence has generated an interesting debate. Copyright is a tool to protect the rights of a human author, not a machine. However, it is still true that the algorithms used by AI have been written by a human programmer. Should the author then be understood to be the programmer and, by extension, the company that has patented the algorithm? In this case, should the copyright of the algorithm be protected or also everything that it produces?
The debate is far from being easily resolved, and it will become more complicated as the solvency of these algorithms when conceiving works of art increases exponentially. A debate that, surprisingly, would have been irrelevant just a decade ago. Interesting times are coming that refer to that conversation that Will Smith has with a robot in the movie I, robot : “Can a robot write a symphony or turn a canvas into a beautiful work of art?” The machine responds: “Can you do it?”
