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

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131–140 of 183 posts

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

#131
post #31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't considered prior art, then that de-facto makes it possible to patent AI-generated content by laundering them through humans.

I think that's probably expected and also not a big deal. As long as there is a human in the loop it becomes rate limited, saving people from having to look for prior art in some exabyte shit heap.

It's also rate-limited because patents cost money, go into a queue for years, and are reviewed by humans.

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

#132

One thing I never understood.. is who actually checks for honesty in this space? For example we heard AI can't patent inventions, or copyright pictures/images. But how do you prove that my picture, or invention even used AI? If I remove watermarks from AI pictures, either through code or photoshop; Or just credit myself for the invention (I made it up in my head), how is this enforced? I see the only way of this AI s…

The same as everywhere else, the courts. You can claim you just made it all up in your head. The other party that will claim your invention or image is not protected and they are not infringing. A judge or jury decides.

And before this the copyright or patent office will filter out a lot of obvious applications that don't qualify.

So really unless you are pursuing others for infringement(and they are making a lot of money), no one cares if you are honest about using AI

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

#133
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its for when AGI takes over that we preemptively ban it from patenting gazillion inventions in 1 day.

Well, it's only able to apply for a gazillion inventions in 1 day. The patent office should then just be able to deny all of them in one fell swoop

The patent office subscribes to the same AI service as the inventors do.

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

#134

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.

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”'.

It’s both. Most of the cases are about the former. People trying to credit AI. These people are largely dumb.

It is technically true that the latter is there, but you have to go out of your way to not get a patent for something you create using ai as a tool. It’s very easy to circumvent because it is not meant to be an obstruction to using ai to discover things in the first place.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A song is a recipe using ingredients we all have access to.

And thus we usually do not have patents for songs, only copyright protections.

Recipes are not copyrightable either.

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

#136
So I am not sure how this is different from patent entities today? IBM files thousands of parents a year because its employees collectively file thousands of parents a year (with dubious levels of novelty). Wouldnt this mean a human is now verifying a patent or even better a human's name is slapped on a patent that AI generated before filing to the PTO?

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cooki…

It's worth pointing out industrial food preparation processes can be patented. Beyond Meat for instance:

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015161099A1/en

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but we're still stuck with the patent.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I think when we have artificial sentience we will have to have different specifics. It makes sense. Should be the same with different biologicals too. I think this is how we should generally think about artificial sentient creatures, think about aliens.

But I think at an abstract level we should all be equal. Specific will be different, but general abstract rights should be the same. Like what you point out has to deal with death. But it can get more nuanced and real fast. Removing a biological's arm is significant destruction. Removing a robot's arm is still damage, but not life altering as it can be either reattached (if it was simply disassembled), likely easily repairable, and most certainly replaceable. So the punishment should be different. The reverse situation might be forcing one into a MRI machine. Annoying for human, death for the robot. Backups also are tricky as we have to get into the whole philosophical debate about what self means and without a doubt there is "death" between the time/experiences that were lost (maybe bad analogy is force teleporting someone into the future, but where they just take over the consciousness of the future self and have no memories of the time between despite it actually having happened).

Yeah, I agree that it's going to make things more complicated and it is very much worth thinking about. It's important if you believe in aliens too (why wouldn't you?), because if it is ever possible to make contact with them (I'm certain we have not already. You're not going to convince me with tic-tacs), we will need to adapt to them too. It's a general statement for "non-human life."

IMO I think this is why it is so important to focus on the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The letter is a compression of the spirit and it is without a doubt a lossy compression. Not to mention that time exists...

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may be possible that we never have such a definition and we're stuck with Justice Potter's reasoning. You're certainly right that there are complexities, but this is an argument about focusing on the spirit of the law and recognizing that there are many nuances that cause there to be no globally optimal solution for the vast majority of problems (if not all).
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