Hacker News Reader

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com