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Comment by ubutler | Hacker News Reader

This is not surprising, the Federal Court of Australia issued a similar ruling last year for the same reason, namely that an inventor for the purposes of patent law must be a natural person and AI are not legal persons: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2a9508a2-d7fa...

Also worth noting that that case involved the same plaintiff as this one, Dr Stephen Thaler, who has been on a mission to have a court recognise his AI system, DABUS, as capable of inventing patents.

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Yes, dude is on a quixotic quest to get his AI recognized as an inventor, and is basically being denied in every jurisdiction.

TFA links to an article about him being rejected in the US, https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-rejects-compu... . The interesting/surprising part for me is that Lawrence Lessig and some other academics wrote briefs supporting his claim.

Lessig's brief is here:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-919/263320/2023...

Seems to be overly focused on the business impacts rather than the potential welfare improvements, but I can sort of see their point if I squint.

> Yes, dude is on a quixotic quest to get his AI recognized as an inventor, and is basically being denied in every jurisdiction.

What, in the end, seems quite useful for people in general!

which is curious because an AI won't request a patent, so what benefit does he expect for applying on it's behalf? some infinite lifetime patent?

> what benefit does he expect for applying on it's behalf

Publicity. And as you see he is getting it.

LLMs are very good at mimicking humans, so "an AI won't request a patent" is almost certainly already false regardless of any legal, moral, financial, or quality-of-output considerations.

LLMs don't do that unprompted, though. So prompting an AI to invent something and then file for a patent for the invention is comparable to using a template for the patent application. They don't have that kind of agency (yet).

So if we package up AI into an autonomous loop, so that it can file for a patent unprompted, that is sufficient precondition to allow patents to be assigned to such a loop?

Yes, the person who packages up a loop to make patents, get a patent for that loop and anything else it produces, right?

Move this to the "Autonomous vehicle" line of thought. IF we accept the risks of a vehicle without a driver, how do we accomodate the _culpability_ of that risk?

Same thing in patent law. Someone needs to hold that "culpability". Maybe there'll be a robust future systems of laws that assigns the correct weightings, but it's not today.

no, because they don't have access to a credit card to pay the fees.

Corporate bank accounts are a thing, at least one country considers bitcoin to be legal tender, and 1.7 billion humans had no back account as recently as 2018.

Interesting question. I guess that's one of the upcoming challenges for the entire legal system when it comes to AI.

One fundamental problem with such approach would of course be money. The AI would need to have a means of paying the fees and the USPTO declaration (37 CFR 1.63) may also prove difficult for an AI - "wilfulness" w.r.t. to false statements comes to mind. But that's a whole new can of worms I don't want to open.

You don't have to tell them to do something specific.

You can tell them to generate ideas, pick one and go from there.

While this is an increasingly arbitrary delineation as more things fill the previously empty gap between people and things[0], I'd count that as a human using a tool.

[0] except for all the racism and sexism and slavey and arguments about animal rights and if unborn foetuses are people etc.

While true, that doesn't really matter. Prompts can be any experiential input, and it's trivial to turn them into agents. Even as high level controllers for robots, demonstrated by at least Agility with Digit and Boston Dynamic with Spot.

So in reality whats being patented _is the prompt that get the AI a patent_

Spamming the patent office

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