Ask HN: Can you patent prompts?

I decided to ask this question because of a rather contrived informal discussion I'm involved in with colleagues from both academia and industry, neither of which are lawyers but who share a few concerns about how we can go about creating new "things" and intellectual property in an increasingly AI-centric world.

You can take prompts as "processes", or "embodiments" or any variation on intellectual property, but I'd love to know what people think about this--my particular concern was that if you ship your software as Open Source, could someone nitpick over your prompts and claim they were taken from their IP/software? How valid would this be given that prompts are, essentially language? How detailed does a prompt need to be to be complex intellectual property that describes a process? Can we consider it as code and an embodiment of a concept?

Discuss. And Happy Holidays!

Hmmm, I think of prompts more like recipes than an algorithm. Similar in both regards, but to the layman, I think prompts are becoming as common practice in daily lives as recipes.

Recipes can be trade secrets but not IP.(Unless it's a super rare circumstance that proves uniqueness in a 'Food Science' way).

I surely hope no one can patent a prompt. That would be an annoying world to live in.

its just an brand like you can register yourself one.

I’d assume prompts fall under copyright law, like code does, but if a lawyer can weigh in, that’d be interesting.

Maybe there has already been a case that’s been debated in court.

You cannot patent a prompt.

Anyone who attempts to do so will either need to be secretive and bribey to pull it off and will then also have to hope that no one ever finds out because if they did, then in any legal proceedings that come due to said patent, (which is the entire point of a patent), the outcome will be that their patent is invalidated by the court and the case thrown out.

The point of a patent is to make it so that, while the patent lasts, no one else can use said patent without licensing it from you, and if they do so without the license they open themselves up to civil penalties that can exceed any potential profits from the illicit licensing.

1: Prompts have no value in and of themselves.

2: The ownership of raw AI generated materials is in a grey area. It might be public domain, it might be owned by the person who prompted it, we don't have clear hard guidelines on that.

3: AI is trained on a dataset of billions of pieces of other peoples work. Any novelty (novelty is a requirement for a patent) that comes from AI is at best an accident of the same variety as the colors produced by spilling paint, where it has taken a slice from one person and a slice from another person and mixed them together.

So, all in all, AI prompts and their output are almost certainly not patentable, at least as long as one sane person is in the pipeline somewhere.