Earlier today, I read an interesting article from the MIT Technology Review asking the question "can an AI be an inventor"? It was a fascinating read and very much related to part 2 of my current series on the future of AI for the new decade.
There were two sides taking counter views on the argument but what got me really thinking was the rather weak argument the side arguing against AI being inventive used. They argued that just because one uses MS Word (or Excel) to write an article (or a model) doesn't mean the author (or the inventor) of the article is MS Word (or MS Excel) - and yes you guessed it, it was lawyers saying this!
What makes this argument exceptionally weak and probably borderline naive - MS Word or Excel does not create, invent or innovate on its own - is the lack of understanding of what AI can to today. AI today, can create art that never existed before, AI today, can invent materials that never existed before and in fact, AI today, can compose music that no one has ever sang or composed before.
So this begs the question. If in 2020, an AI algorithm (of course trained using human composed music genres) creates a new music genre that has never been heard of before but turns out better than any other composed by a human in 2020, will the American Music Awards (AMA) grant its award to such AI?
If an AI algorithm is trained on all the music composed by Beethoven, and it comes up with a piece of music Beethoven did not create, who actually gets the credit? Beethoven, the programmer or.....?
Humanity probably for the first time since its existence has entered a new decade far behind the advances of the machines - and, I'll be watching the new terminator movie, Dark Fate in a whole new light.
