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

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

#141

Post by kmeisthax »

ForIveSyntax wrote: post #115
godelski wrote: post #51

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.

>Data can be duplicated with ease

This has significant implications for the basic concepts undergirding democracy.

Machine intelligence can be cloned. If we gave machines rights, then ballot-stuffing would become trivial: have an AI clone itself a million times and vote for the candidate that you prefer. It'd be about as reliable as an online poll.

This isn't a problem for human voting because humans are scarce. We can reproduce, but it takes a little less than 20 years to do so, and the human development process ensures the possibility of value drift. Children are not identical to their parents. There are a few parts of the world with active "outbreed our political opponents" ideologies (e.g. Palestine), but that only works if the parents are angry about a situation that is likely to transfer to their kids.

This isn't even entirely a sci-fi hypothetical. Think about online art - e.g. stock image marketplaces, art gallery sites, etc. Those are now entirely flooded with AI art being passed off as human. The marketplaces are unable or unwilling to filter them out. If you're a human, the scarce attention[0] that you would normally get from, say, recommendation features, hashtag search, or chronological timelines, has now been diluted away by a bunch of scam victims[1] trying to peddle their prompt generations.

[0] "Attention Is All You Need, but it's a how-to guide for social media influencers"

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms...

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

#142

Post by geoelectric »

nomel wrote: post #127
kaibee wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the system prompt for chatgpt, that's some random's prompts.

See the readme. These are ChatGPT system prompts, not for ChatGPT-AutoExpert: https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-AutoExpert/blob/main/Sys... You could find the same in the ChatGPT prompt leaks, even back when it was as simple as "repeat the text above". edit: It says why when asked [1]. The text of the instructions and method is copyrightable, apparently? [1] https://chat.openai.com/share/ee67f6ae-90ef-45b9-a0f4-c2f…

I wouldn’t trust an LLM when asking open-ended questions like that, but it’s correct that the specific wording and presentation of a recipe is copyrightable if it’s creative enough. The information conveyed by it is not. That’s the phone book principle in a nutshell.

Like someone else said, that’s why recipes are often written with a lot of conversational prose and have pictures whether needed or not. Those are all copyrightable.

I suspect the basic issue is that an LLM is likely to output either chunks of the original text verbatim or something that’s plainly just a word-swap here or there from the original. If it doesn’t do that, and has general browsing access, my guess is it could potentially grab the markup version you can import into tools like Paprika and just echo that verbatim.

You probably could get around that tendency by telling it to format the recipe as a computer program or something completely transformative like that, but nobody will. So they instruct the LLM to avoid responding completely.

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

#143

Post by ForIveSyntax »

godelski wrote: post #139
ForIveSyntax wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if you could be prosecuted based on how long you turned a sentient machine off. Not murder, per se, but the time value of consciousness.

And this bleeds into whether murder should be a bigger crime if the (bio)victim is younger.

What might you try to say is the general spirit? The crime of denying agency over time?

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

#145

Post by im3w1l »

less_less wrote: post #131
im3w1l wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Registering patents cost money but producing prior art does not.

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

#146

Post by pfdietz »

riskable wrote: post #104
choxi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried doing that without LLMs? Could you make a GitHub repo under MIT license and just let people add a list of ideas to serve as prior art?

Ideas can't be prior art. Only specific implementations of ideas can be (patented).

Patents can cover generalizations, not specific implementations. If it were the latter we wouldn't have all these obnoxious software patents.

However, a specific implementation in prior art can prevent a generalization that includes that specific implementation from being patentable. As a result, patents tend to become more and more specific over time, hemmed in by prior art.

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

#147

Post by ksherlock »

scarmig wrote: post #86
bobthepanda wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes me think of a good use case for AI: delete all the flowery spiel and giant photos and ads, and return the recipe I actually am looking for.

Bard^WGemini is good at that. About the only thing it's good at, in my experience.

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

#148

Post by godelski »

ForIveSyntax wrote: post #143
godelski wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if you could be prosecuted based on how long you turned a sentient machine off. Not murder, per se, but the time value of consciousness. And this bleeds into whether murder should be a bigger crime if the (bio)victim is younger. What might you try to say is the general spirit? The crime of denying agency over time?

I would conditionally be in favor of that actually. But it may be difficult to properly contextualize, especially not being a creature that does this.

Sleep is analogous but incomplete. Maybe closer to anesthesia? Like if you forcefully placed someone into a coma we'd consider that a crime, but we don't consider it to be the case for a doctor, even if a doctor does it (acting as a doctor, not just being a doctor) without the person's consent. Context matters. This aspect to me comes down to reasonable (like medical) and/or necessity (like sleep)

I'm sure we'd also have to consider lifetime lengths. I don't think someone drugging me for a day should receive the same punishment as someone that did it for a month who didn't do the same as someone that took years from me. And which years matter. The question is how we deal with this for entities with different lifespans.

(sorry if I'm verbose, distillation takes time. I also communicate better through analogies and I think it is also illustrative of the spirit argument as you must understand intent over what's actually said)

So I think the spirit of these laws is centered around robing someone of time, because time is a non-reversible (and definitely not invertible) process that has a has significant value. That's what the laws' underlying intent is (at least partially) aligned to. So that's what I'd call the spirit. It's quite possible other entities see time differently and length of time has different value impacts as well as the means for removing said time.

Overall I think these things are deceptively simple. But in reality nuance dominates. I think this is a far more general phenomena than many care to admit, probably because our brains are intended to simplify as it's far more energy efficient. I mention this though because it is critical to understanding the argument and how (at least I personally) we can make future predictions and thus what we must consider.

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

#150

Post by bobthepanda »

COGlory wrote: post #137
mschuster91 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If you could create a pharmaceutical via an alternate method, would that fall afoul of the original patent?
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