AI And Written Description: When Does An AI Patent Claim Cross The Line?

Following Ed Garlepp's great discussion on AI disclosure issues¹², I want to describe a related problem with AI and issues arising under the written description requirement that I often bring up when presenting on this topic. I started raising this topic following an episode of HBO's Silicon Valley.   One of the characters who lives in the incubator depicted in the show, Jian Yang, pitches an app to venture capitalists called "See Food" which is described as a "Shazam for food." The user takes a picture of food, and then the app returns an identification of the food.    Eventually Jian Yang does come up with an app that can identify food. The problem: it can only identify "hot dog" and "not hot dog."  When asked why he only created an app that only recognizes one type of food, Jian Yang explains that identifying more foods will require scraping significantly more images of food from the Internet to use as training data for a computational model.