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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

One great application of AI design is patent poisoning. Use AI to churn out masses of variant designs, make them publicly visible on a web site, and if future patents come out use any collisions to invalidate them or at least restrict their scope (generalization of a patent is limited by prior art.)

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I’m reminded of lawyer Damien Riehl’s (performative) reaction to the Sam Smith infringement decision, back in 2019/2020. He and programmer Noah Rubin algorithmically generated every possible melody (within a certain combinatorial space, in MIDI format as I recall), and purported to release them under CC-0 license [0]. He went on to attract some attention and explain his argument at a regional TEDx event [1].

I seem to recall legal commentators reacting with an eyeroll—apparently judges split much finer hairs than these for a living—but it was a cute stunt.

[0] https://allthemusic.info/

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU and https://www.the-independent.com/tech/music-copyright-algorit...

Copyrights are a bit different from patents.

For sure, but I suspect the law might look similarly dimly on the argument that “machines systematically generated all possibilities in the problem space” === “somebody already had this idea.” I’d imagine maybe by reading specific human intention into “prior art” and “existing work” and those sorts of terms.

Which is not to say let’s not do it anyway and see!

Or they might conclude "even an AI could come up with this, it's obvious". Obviousness is a defense in patent law, not in copyright law.

There is a fairly effective counterpoint here that information is worthless if nobody can find it. Generating a handful of useful designs in a sea of pointless ones doesn’t count as ‘coming up with it’. Remember that a description of every idea already exists in the Library of Babel. I do not think that AI generation without curation really counts as ideation.

Suppose we create a database of (say) 5 million AI generated inventions.

Against the claim that this wouldn't be searchable, we can just observe that this is about the size of the US patent database. Does this mean patents are not searchable? In that case, aren't all patent infringements excused?

Wouldn't work. Judges would not treat the AI generated designs as prior art without proof of human involvement (above and beyond entering the prompt).

Maybe not prior art but very much "not novel".

If a human was not involved then it remains novel to humans.

Otherwise someone could copyright every combination of words.

If patents can’t be granted to an AI inventor, I don’t see how such AI “inventions” could be used as prior art.

Prior art doesn't have to be a patent. A frickin' Soviet movie was prior art in the Blue Origin/SpaceX lawsuit about landing rockets on barges.

Yes, but that movie was made by a human.

My point was that it’s hard to imagine citing something that could not be patented as prior art. It would be like citing a phone book as proof that a software program can’t be copyrighted (“the exact bytes appear in the 1973 Albany NY white pages, therefore it wasn’t original”)

> My point was that it’s hard to imagine citing something that could not be patented as prior art.

There is no need for it to be patentable (or patented). Prior art only requires that it be described and be made publicly available. It doesn't even require the originator of the information to be identified (traditional knowledge is prior art.)

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