AI could, however, poison the well for human patents, by making inventions and putting them into public view.
Let's have LLMs churn out millions of discoveries, stick them on a public web site, then use that as a resource to kill other patents.
Let's have LLMs churn out millions of discoveries, stick them on a public web site, then use that as a resource to kill other patents.
Feb 29, 2025, Washington, DC: "A Federal Court ruled today that AI-generated text does not qualify as prior-art...."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...
I have no idea if it worked and I’m surprised if it did.
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm
TL;DR musical copyright is already borderline-absurd just given nearly-free recording and retention and a lot of people participating in musical creation for a century or three. Add incredibly-productive creativity-simulating computers to the mix and it’s entirely absurd—nothing’s actually original enough to pass as distinct beyond a surprisingly-quickly-reached point, the space is too small. It all becomes accidental rediscovery or outright plagiarism.
Not at all. GP's idea is not to submit it anywhere. Only once someone else tries to patent X, the AI maintainer would point out that X was already discovered by their AI, is public knowledge and cannot be patented.
To what extent is the output of a generative model patentable or copyrightable? Do we need to refine our distinction between "invention" and "discovery"?
However, a specific implementation in prior art can prevent a generalization that includes that specific implementation from being patentable. As a result, patents tend to become more and more specific over time, hemmed in by prior art.
The machines in question aren't motivated to create by a government granted monopoly on the fruits of their creation.
The act of creating the invention isn't special - a machine did it. No need to reward the machine for immense creativity or stunning inspiration.
Patents don't award owners for their "stunning inspiration" or "immense creativity" it gives them a temporary monopoly so they can recoup their r&d costs when taking their invention to market, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention.
The purpose of patents is simply to encourage invention and discourage keeping inventions a secret. It's not premised on the "act of creation being special".
The way this is most likely to play out is that humans will use AI as tools to help them invent things, not that AI will invent things all by itself. So the premise and need for patents will remain intact.
If, however, AI somehow accomplishes the same goal as the patent system, then the patent system becomes unnecessary and will go away. As long as the goal is still being achieved, that's OK.
The purpose of the patent system, really, is to benefit society, not inventors.
The real reason is to own ideas, because people feel that creation is special. Takes hard work, or creativity or inspiration from the gods.
Machine generated ideas undermines all of that.
You say that with such confidence like as if it is a well proven fact. Care to share your evidence that it is not a simple case of a niche product with low volume?
Start with all existing patents and have an AI add "on a computer", "using AI", and "using a LLM" to each one. Also ask the AI to predict novel variations. Gather all that together and randomly sample and combine chunks and use the AI to make those random chunks into coherent ideas. Bake for 3 months and boom, you publish The Tome of 1 Trillion Novel Works of Prior Art: Volume 1.