South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor
globallegalpost.com
globallegalpost.com
https://www.bowmanslaw.com/insights/intellectual-property/so...
A markov-chain based word-generator could just have easily gotten the patent issued, because the patent office does not examine the patent application for patentability, it only checks that the correct procedure is followed.
I understand a proper type of technical patent analysis in the approval process is extremely hard and resource consuming, but the way it's handled now is killing anyone not having a legal firm on their speed dial and cash to burn.
What if someone patents these examiners first? :)
"[A] patent is not a hunting license. It is not a reward for the search, but compensation for its successful conclusion" - Brenner v. Manson [1]
In the above case, the inventor discovered a whole class of molecules. The Supreme Court said that you can't patent that because you have to show that each thing you patent can be used for something useful. Basically, the inventor couldn't just claim the whole class of molecules to keep anyone from using them and then figure out what they're good for later.
> In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps.
This is only a problem if the AI is litigious. Surely an AI with true agency would be keep the patent rights to themselves
I, for one, welcome our new Robocop overlords.
Patents already have quite a big fee, but perhaps it should be made larger to prevent this kind of abuse. If the large fee prevents inventors, then perhaps some scheme along the lines of 'The fee is $50 for the first 5 inventions, then $100k per patent after that" might be suitable.
(1) isn’t a legal person
(2) wouldn’t be able to confer ownership and
(3) identify when the patent was being infringed.
This is silly. Great theater, but nothing else.
That being said AI patents are an issue, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet.
The 1981 ZX81 Chess program that ran in 1kiB of RAM would have astonished a 19th century observer and would have qualified as "artificial intelligence" from their point of view. What's currently called "AI" is not that much different from that program. Claiming it has somehow any kind of personhood is just nonsensical, and probably a publicity stunt. Why not list SPICE or your favorite finite elements solver in your patent application as a contributor?
It's pretty significantly different to that program, both in terms of scope, complexity and output.
I'm going to assume by "person" we mean some kind of intelligence which appears to be self-aware, or that can interact with humans to make it difficult to distinguish between human and machine (what's a human in terms of thinking, if a machine can output the same thoughts?)
We aren't anywhere near there yet, but if you contrast the 1981 chess program's ability to be considered a "person" vs GPT-3's ability to be considered a "person", the second is substantially closer to that end position.
Modern ML is vastly more complex, capable, and widely-applicable than the first chess programs, but it's not intelligent, and doesn't have any greater ability to be 'considered a person'.
An aeroplane is a much more complex, capable, and widely-applicable vehicle than a bicycle, but it's no more human or more generally intelligent.
(Given that we don't have their side of the story and they are only listed as not having rejected it)
South Africa has become the first country to award a patent that names an artificial intelligence as its inventor and the AI’s owner as the patent's owner.
Edit - I not claiming this is the correct result. Just looking for clarification on what this means, legally speaking.
This is the patent application, as far as I can tell. And as others have noted, this is obviously a political stunt—the article makes that clear as well.
Frustratingly, it doesn't seem like there's anything interesting or useful happening in the actual patent. It would not surprise me to find that they had been rejected in part because the idea seems to be either literally impossible to implement or basically uninteresting, depending on your interpretation.
Also, as a non-lawyer, this stunt requires talking out of both sides of one's mouth. They necessarily assert that they have the authority to speak on behalf of the machine listed as the inventor in order to assign ownership of the patent, so why not just assert oneself as the inventor?
Patents, as they exist, typically list an inventor, but the owner can be different. Mostly, the inventor is an employee and the owner is the employer. Where this can get hairy is FOSS. If FOSS invents something...
I think there might be other philosophical objections. If a NN "invents" something, perhaps its unpatentable because it is (by some definition) trivial or discovery of a natural law... IE, not a creative work for patent purposes.
Ultimately, patent law and the arguments underpinning it have many avenues for philosophical "attack." But, it's a legal framework, not a philosophical one.
“Tools do stuff, humans do stuff, are humans tools?” Is abuse of transitive property in an illogical way.
If the point of this stunt is that the owner (operator?) of an AI may not understand how specifically the AI produced a solution ... fine I guess. But if we have black-ish box AIs that let us find good solutions we don't ourselves understand, surely those tools will be available to other practitioners as well.
Does everything that is findable by a common AI architecture become "obvious" b/c a person with ordinary skill can launch the AI which finds it in from a colab notebook?
It would be interesting to see it turned the other way around. If a company owns all inventions made by employee event if it's done outside the working hours without company equipment due to the contract, do they own inventions made by AI running on a computer owned by employee?
AI software isn't like any legal entity that currently exists. Software can be duplicated instantly, people and companies cannot.
Example: I searched for aerodinamics genetic algorithms and I found "Genetic algorithms applied to the aerodynamic design of transonic airfoils" https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.46810 (paywalled but that's not the point.)
Rename genetic algorithms into Multi Generational AI and is the Patent Office going to accept a patent for those airfoils with the AI as the inventor?