(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.