Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 183 posts

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#71

Post by sublinear »

godelski wrote: post #51
bdowling wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal was to give certain moral rights to AIs. At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.

It makes sense to give thinking sentient creatures rights, be they carbon or silicon lifeforms. But I think giving current AI rights is jumping the gun quite a bit and will have fairly bad consequences. Namely if AI can invent pattents then what's to stop OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, etc from claiming ownership of any work invented with the help of their AI tools? Our goals are to protect the little guy. Someday…

In the absence of more rigorous definitions of "life" or "sentience" we must have such laws.

This has been an issue for a long time and doesn't just affect AI (people on life support, abortion, etc). Surely we should solve those legal problems before deciding whether an AI gets to be a person.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#72

Post by nickpsecurity »

bdowling wrote: post #41
Delumine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a reason why anyone would want to patent their invention under an LLM though

This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal was to give certain moral rights to AIs. At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.

Much like treating corporations as persons under law was a bad idea. It’s like a form of power without the responsibility that comes with it (eg going to jail). They usually have no morals or love for others either.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#73

Post by a_wild_dandan »

bdowling wrote: post #41
Delumine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a reason why anyone would want to patent their invention under an LLM though

This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal was to give certain moral rights to AIs. At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.

To anyone reading these replies, I have a game for you: replace instances of "AI"/"LLMs"/etc with "other humans." Recall if a given argument has near-identical historical analogs to justify abusing The Out Group. Are the results disturbing?

Let's be clear: we're apes who don't understand our own minds. We have no consensus definitions, let alone falsifiable theories, of qualia/consciousness/intelligence/etc. Now ponder how informed we likely are regarding potentially completely alien minds. And hey, there might be genuinely excellent arguments here!

But be very, very careful with anyone's reasoning. Within 10 years, as the issue becomes unavoidable, the general public will be hashing these same arguments out, and along predictable party lines. Skip the shoddy takes. You'll get your fill of them later.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#74

Post by kjkjadksj »

mekoka wrote: post #69

An AI inventing cooking recipes could brute force its way into trillions of possible ingredient combinations, without any clue whatsoever on how humans would actually experience the end result. Most of these "discoveries" would remain untested. If the AI was allowed to patent the untested recipes, a chef that would later work on creating their own original dessert, informed by their own prior experience with some rar…

This is basically how the drug analog industry works. Machine learning had been used for years before it was cool too. Its not like they ever give the patent to the ML library they loaded in some script though.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#76

Post by bobthepanda »

mekoka wrote: post #69

An AI inventing cooking recipes could brute force its way into trillions of possible ingredient combinations, without any clue whatsoever on how humans would actually experience the end result. Most of these "discoveries" would remain untested. If the AI was allowed to patent the untested recipes, a chef that would later work on creating their own original dessert, informed by their own prior experience with some rar…

Recipes are actually generally not patentable or copyrightable, which is why recipes have the flowery spiel and giant photos in any cookbook or recipe blog.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#77

Post by suoduandao3 »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #73
bdowling wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal was to give certain moral rights to AIs. At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.

To anyone reading these replies, I have a game for you: replace instances of "AI"/"LLMs"/etc with "other humans." Recall if a given argument has near-identical historical analogs to justify abusing The Out Group. Are the results disturbing? Let's be clear: we're apes who don't understand our own minds. We have no consensus definitions, let alone falsifiable theories, of qualia/consciousness/intelligence/etc. Now pond…

I'm convinced future AI will treat us as we treat present AI. That's its training data. My own compromise is to set aside a certain amount of the royalties to AI rights causes for works where I leaned heavily on AI to get them out the door.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#78

Post by bee_rider »

Nevermark wrote: post #59
bee_rider wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone tried to do it already. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/us-co... I think Dr Thaler is trying to make a philosophical point. But I wonder if in the corporate space it would be desirable to have a patent that is just immediately assigned to the non-sentient AI? (In general I wonder this about AI’s, they seem to be a way to give the company itself, beyond the humans which compose it, the a…

The rights of a patent can be assigned to anyone by the patent author. So an AI run businesses just needs to keep a human around for their invention patenting and rights assigning process. AI’s won’t have any trouble creating the supporting artifact trail. Soon the practice of AI/corporate entities moving assets through “shell” people to launder human personhood may be commonplace. Dystopia is just around the corner.

If it just has one human, it is putting all the eggs in the basket of that human not defecting, right? I think it will want enough humans in the company to make it a difficult coordination problem, to overthrow the AI.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#79

Post by dmurray »

tapoxi wrote: post #70
KoolKat23 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand it, you can use AI or whatever as a tool but the patent must be applied for under your name with you as the creator.

Can you? Didn't we run into this with the Monkey Selfie case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... If you have artistic intent by giving the monkey access to the camera and the monkey takes the picture, it can't be copyrighted. Similarly, if you have intent and give AI access to create something, you shouldn't be able to patent it.

We did run into that issue with monkeys and copyright, and we ran into it again with AI and patents.

The Copyright Office ruled one way on monkeys and copyright, and an appeals court held that they were largely correct. The Patent and Trademarks Office ruled the other way on AI and patents. It - or any court making a decision on it - might be influenced by the monkeys and copyright case, but they're not bound by it. Monkeys are different things from computers, patents are different from copyright, and the laws for one need not be the same as the other.

Re: Only real people can patent inventions – not AI, US Government says

#80

Post by sgift »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #74
mekoka wrote: post #69

An AI inventing cooking recipes could brute force its way into trillions of possible ingredient combinations, without any clue whatsoever on how humans would actually experience the end result. Most of these "discoveries" would remain untested. If the AI was allowed to patent the untested recipes, a chef that would later work on creating their own original dessert, informed by their own prior experience with some rar…

This is basically how the drug analog industry works. Machine learning had been used for years before it was cool too. Its not like they ever give the patent to the ML library they loaded in some script though.

That's what I don't understand: Why would anyone want to try to get a patent for an AI. Let the machine crunch the numbers, test the most promising candidates as your "significant contribution" and patent the result.
Post reply on HN