IBM's fast-talking AI machine just lost to a human champion in a live debate

San Francisco (CNN Business)People are great at arguing. But a project from IBM shows that computers are getting quite good at it, too. On Monday, Harish Natarajan, a grand finalist in 2016's World Debating Championships, faced off against IBM's Project Debater -- a computer touted by the company as the first artificial-intelligence system built to meaningfully debate humans. Natarajan won, but the computer demonstrated the increasingly complex arguments that AI is starting to make. Project Debater, which has been in the works since 2012, is designed to come up with coherent, convincing speeches of its own, while taking in the arguments of a human opponent and creating its own rebuttal.