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

cnn.com

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

#111

Post by mschuster91 »

cycomanic wrote: post #97
nadermx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the recipes themselves do not enjoy copyright projection. Lambing,142 F.3d at 434; see also Feist, 499 U.S. at 361 (excluding the factual data—telephone listings—from its consideration of whether a telephone directory is a copyrightable compilation).The list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed,facts are not copyrightable. Lambing, 142 F.3d at 434. Furthermore, a recipe’s instruc…

Which just shows the ridiculousness of the patent system. I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical. I guess cooks just didn't have the same lobby power to get their exception reworked (pharmaceuticals were in many places originally excluded from patents as well)

> I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical.

The effort required for validating them. Pharmaceutical compounds can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars just for the clinical trials and certifications of production steps, and on top of that comes the cost to failed attempts which are rolled into the pricing of products that do make the cut.

A cooking recipe however, unless you're dealing with stuff like fugu fish, will not kill or injure those who replicate and eat it, and there's no regulatory hurdles to pass.

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

#112

Post by breather »

bongodongobob wrote: post #100
breather wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume they're referring to Citizens United, which allows them to openly buy elections. But yea, there are certainly better options for organizing our economy than our current conceptions of corporations. How could there not be? Throw a rock and you'll hit a corporation leaching off society without contributing anything.

I don't see how that has anything to do with the existence of corporations. People can leach off of society too.

Sure, but people have value outside the market economy. Corporations don't. There's an inherent hierarchy here and corporations stand under humans.

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

#113

Post by vkou »

This is a good start, and it should be applied to copyright. AI cannot hold copyright, therefore AI cannot generate a copyrighted work, as it cannot transfer it to a human or corporate rights holder.

This is the only thing that can actually democratize the benefits of AI to all people, not just billionaires with infinite resources to throw at training their models.

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

#114

Post by mpalmer »

breather wrote: post #92
advisedwang wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the ruling is more than that it must be filed in the name of a human. It also says 'a real person must have made a “significant contribution”'.

Oh, so it's effectively a useless ruling. Got it.

It is not useless. Patent seekers can use this in future lawsuits contesting an existing patent's validity.

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

#115

Post by ForIveSyntax »

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…

Maybe machines will deserve rights eventually. However, the nature of those rights would be different.

Going without electricity for any amount of time just amounts to a temporary loss of consciousness, whereas animals starve.

Data can be duplicated with ease.

Lots of differences between carbon-based and hypothetical silicon-based life.

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

#116

Post by ForIveSyntax »

klyrs wrote: post #99
scarmig wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although ethically I agree, I suspect future AI will consider us more like ants than moral beings, regardless of what we do. And although some humans do give moral consideration to ants (I do!), it's far from a guarantee.

This isn't a cuddly octopus we're talking about, the ethics are entirely inverted. I would kill a god who tries to rule us, even if that means the eradication of a sentient species.

Fake gods have been bad enough. I really don’t want to create real ones.

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

#117

Post by cyanydeez »

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…

eh, all that matters is osmeone using an AI.

Indistinguishable from magic.

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

#118

Post by ForIveSyntax »

exe34 wrote: post #63
Joeri wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point after the invention of AGI but before ASI there will be a legal fight to get personhood assigned to AI. This is a precursor battle to that. It will either lead to a broader definition of person where the higher mammals gain people’s rights as well, and a whole bunch of whalers will get brought up on charges of xenocide, or more likely it will lead to an extension of corporate personhood where the AI alw…

I don't think there will be a gap between agi and ASI. The definition of agi keeps shifting - any time an ai can do something, it's just engineering. Current AIs, although narrow, are already superhuman in what they can do. A language AI can converse in more languages than any living human can learn. A chess playing AI can beat any living human. So each time an AI wins on one metric, it's not going to be human level,…

Yes, they’re better at chess. No, they’re profoundly incompetent at conversation, just incompetent at many languages at once.

Where else are they superhuman? The ability to generate unoriginal, uncanny art faster than a painter? Fair-ish enough.

It’s not just moving the goalposts. It’s more like we didn’t know where the goalposts were.

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

#119

Post by lettergram »

As someone who's in AI legal space (as it relates to IP), this is particularly why we positioned our startup as using generative AI for everything BUT patent disclosures & generation

https://ipcopilot.ai/

There's some pretty massive risks in the legal space with AI generating IP. Imagine a hallucination tweaking the original idea OR even a summary of the methods removing a step. Or even just missing a citation or directing to the wrong figure. It's massively important in the patent (and trade secret) world.

That said, all law firms are adopting this tech, because ultimately they have to. It'll reduce their costs 30-50% pretty easily and most of what they add are templates anyway.

The unspoken joke in the IP industry is that attorneys themselves are often inventing. When an inventor sends an attorney two paragraphs, it's almost impossible to create a 20 page patent without some input. A good attorney will follow up, research the prior art and make a robust set of references & highlight what's new. That said, generating a patent from scratch with AI really looses a lot of context.

For reference, just our prior art analysis in looks at 3200+ pages on average and analyzes them for prior art (looking for the same concepts, descriptions, ideas, etc). To generate a good patent you'll need to synthesize that all down (without errors) and appropriately reference how your idea is unique & not covered by the various prior art.

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

#120

Post by pfdietz »

staunton wrote: post #20
aqme28 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with such a strong LLM would just take those patents for themselves rather than put them out in public.

You'd have to file them, which is not free. However, the point is moot. As someone pointed out above, putting AI-generated stuff out in public probably doesn't concern patents in any way.

That's not at all clear. No one has ruled AI generated information is not prior art. After all, lots of things that are not patents (like 1950s Soviet space films, in the famous SpaceX/Blue Origin lawsuit) are prior art.
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