[bpizzi]

> I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way.

Well, machines are already doing it with paintings: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v2.pdf. There's no technical reason for not being able to achieve this sort of 'machine creativity' with texts. It's just a harder version of the same problem.

> I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby!

I (carefully, waiting for experts' feedback) disagree. ML works on data and algorithms: give a deep RNN a great lot of human made translations, time/cpu to produce a good model, and I think you would be astonished by the results.

Data's complexity is of little hindrance here, because the algorithm does not try to understands the data (as we humans like to think we're doing when reading), it's just trying to infer a solution based on learned behaviors. And it's 'just' ML, AI will come when your computer tell you that this specific text makes it sad, for example.

[rimliu]

I think "good model" is the hard part here and very far from being achieved.