Ray Kurzweil has been issued the first patent for AI software capable of writing poetry.

United States Patent 7,184,949, “Basic poetry generation,” issued February 27, 2007, covers “a method of analyzing an author’s work, including reading a text file, generating an analysis model from the text file and storing the analysis model…a linked data structure.”

The patent has been assigned to Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies, Inc., which offers Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet, a free downloadable screen saver that helps users write poetry and song lyrics. It reads a selection of poems, creates a “language model,” and writes original poems from that model.

The first version of Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet was written by Ray Kurzweil in the mid-1980s.