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It’s a crazy topsy-turvy world in which we live. Sometimes it seems like being a human being is no longer the advantage we once thought it was. Privileges once the province of human beings are suddenly being performed by machines.

A couple weeks ago, Venture Beat reported that an AI in China was granted a copyright by a Chinese court. This is an amazing milestone that many thought could never happen. The part that really blows my mind is that the article that was in question was written back in 2018. This isn’t a super cutting edge piece of programming. It’s something that in some circles could be considered “old.”

The gist of the story goes something like this: The Chinese company Tencent used an AI writing program called Dreamwriter to craft a news article. Dreamwriter created a variety of business-focused financial reports which Tencent published on its website. Another Chinese company picked up the report (apparently thinking it was good enough to reprint) and put it up on a different website – giving credit to the Dreamwriter software as the automated author of the piece. Tencent then sued for copyright infringement.

Now the report is making it’s way out that Tencent won the court case – to the point that the judge levied a financial penalty on the defendant. It wasn’t big, but the simple fact that it even happened is shaking the ground under the creative people of the world.

Let’s be clear. The Dreamwriter AI did not write War and Peace. It was a short article that digested financial data and spit out a narrative that incorporated the relevant bits of the data. This is a common topic for this class of AI authors to manage. Another such example would be to construct an article reporting on a sports event. The Associated Press uses such tools to automatically generate sports coverage.

I’ve seen some of the reports they’ve generated, and they are really quite readable.

The judge in the Dreamwriter case concluded as part of his findings that the AI produced an article with “a certain originality”. I don’t know how much originality that is, but it was clearly enough to motivate the judge to rule in favor of Tencent.

Just because this happened in China doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a world-wide phenomenon. Each country has its own copyright laws. They don’t all work on the same principles or follow the same precedents. Some jurisdictions have explicit rules that copyright can only be granted to a human. However, in China, the owner of Dreamwriter was granted the copyright.

All of that said, the US Patent and Trademark Office, traditionally slow to respond to technological change, has opened a request for comments on this very topic of AI generated text and copyright.

The dam has sprung a leak

Once upon a time the idea of a machine that could write engaging copy was pure science fiction. I think back to the shows and stories of my youth where machines powered by artificial intelligence competed with human beings for intelligence and wit (2001 A Space Odyssey, anyone?). Now it seems that we have taken that small little step in the direction of that future.

Had you asked me last year about this, I would have laughed and said that programs could never write a story as well as a human being. With this little crack in that facade, I assure you that I would use a lot more squishy language today.

This is clearly just the very first step in a long journey. But make no mistake, AI is on the journey.

Almost a year ago OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research organization backed by Elon Musk, withheld releasing it’s GPT-2 machine. This tool could read a short piece of text and generate many more paragraphs in the same style and vein. Worried that it would be used to generate misinformation, they sat on it. Almost six months later they released a curtailed version of the program. Slowly more advanced versions are coming out.

This is just a small string of events. I suspect that many more are about to come.

It’s prime text generation season

In the United states, we’re entering into the campaign season for the 2020 Presidential Election. I feel very safe saying that we are about to witness some very sophisticated examples of automated text generation. The social media blitz that is about to roll over us like an avalanche is building. I can only imagine what Facebook is going to be like by the time Iowa goes to the polls for the first primary.

It’s not realistic to think that the millions of posts are going to be generated by human beings. I think we all know that many of the articles that will be flying around the interwebs will be machine generated. It’s going to be a prime time for the neural networks that generate this kind of text.

This is advanced stuff

I’m not talking here about the kind of machine that can repetitively perform mechanical movements with extreme precision. That’s the cultural assault generally called robotics. It’s disrupting major portions of the manufacturing industry.

This new wave of innovation is all about machines behaving like human beings and doing the kinds of stuff that even we find difficult: Communicating.

When you start looking at your social media feed, ask yourself: How many of the words you’re reading were written by a human being? Yes, your high school buddy is probably writing for himself. As is that goofy uncle and the weird guy that lives down the street. But as we begin to look at the abiity to specifically target messages and bring them to bear on a specific audience, the need for carefully focused text and that at volume will go through the roof.

It’s one thing to read a report about a baseball game. But using the output of machines like this to influence people and have a material effect in the world is a much more serious thing to consider.

Technology has come a long way. It’s not just smart phones and more efficient cars. Now we’re talking about technology that we can interact with, almost as equals. We’re not there yet. I’m looking around the corner a little. But this now seems to be a very plausible future. I’m not ready to assume that we’re going to end up in the matrix. But perhaps R. Daneel Olivaw isn’t so out of the question.

Advanced technology is no longer just for the engineers. It’s penetrating out to the lives of every day people. The next few years promise to be very dynamic as this new technology comes into its own.

AUTHORSHIP: This article was written by Dennis Stevenson – very much a human being.