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South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

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Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#61

Post by sudeepj »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #11
rafaelturk wrote: post #6

I don't know about you, but for me this feels like the gates of hell opening for patent trolls. AI can produce thousands of patents in a single day. As always patent trolls make no money from patents, but from the bureaucratic process. So a schema like this that allows virtually unlimited patents to be created will increase even more trolls misbehavior

Then patent offices will generate adversarial AI review examiners. Together the AI trolls and AI examiners might for the first time produce true innovation out of the patent-giving process

> patent offices will generate adversarial AI review examiners

What if someone patents these examiners first? :)

Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#62

Post by Karliss »

bencollier49 wrote: post #4

I wonder if there is an advantage to a company in not having a named human registered against their patent.

A company might use it to eliminate any benefits of the actual human inventor, even if it's just the recognition as many job contracts are already pretty bad.

It would be interesting to see it turned the other way around. If a company owns all inventions made by employee event if it's done outside the working hours without company equipment due to the contract, do they own inventions made by AI running on a computer owned by employee?

Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#64

Post by easytiger »

GraemeL wrote: post #27
easytiger wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure I have read a Charles Stross novel in which the protagonist does this and becomes the wealthiest person on the planet

Accelerando > In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possibl…

That's the one! Thanks

Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#66

Post by bencollier49 »

skywhopper wrote: post #39

This is silly. You may as well try to credit “calculus” as the inventor of a patent whose key innovation was calculated using a derivative. Some human crafted the problem for the AI, chose the parameters of a good solution, and verified the results. That human or humans are the inventors, not one of the tools they used.

The same logic, by some people's standards, would see all patents credited to God then, I suppose. Human exceptionalism?

Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#67

Post by Closi »

himinlomax wrote: post #54
lettergram wrote: post #25

Yeah the rest of the world declined this because the AI (1) isn’t a legal person (2) wouldn’t be able to confer ownership and (3) identify when the patent was being infringed. This is silly. Great theater, but nothing else. That being said AI patents are an issue, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet.

> That being said AI patents are an issue, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet. The 1981 ZX81 Chess program that ran in 1kiB of RAM would have astonished a 19th century observer and would have qualified as "artificial intelligence" from their point of view. What's currently called "AI" is not that much different from that program. Claiming it has somehow any kind of personhood is just nonsensical, and probably…

> What's currently called "AI" is not that much different from that program.

It's pretty significantly different to that program, both in terms of scope, complexity and output.

I'm going to assume by "person" we mean some kind of intelligence which appears to be self-aware, or that can interact with humans to make it difficult to distinguish between human and machine (what's a human in terms of thinking, if a machine can output the same thoughts?)

We aren't anywhere near there yet, but if you contrast the 1981 chess program's ability to be considered a "person" vs GPT-3's ability to be considered a "person", the second is substantially closer to that end position.

Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#68

Post by abeppu »

I think the interesting question here is whether AI can be involved in what's non-trivial to a "person having ordinary skill in the art"?

If the point of this stunt is that the owner (operator?) of an AI may not understand how specifically the AI produced a solution ... fine I guess. But if we have black-ish box AIs that let us find good solutions we don't ourselves understand, surely those tools will be available to other practitioners as well.

Does everything that is findable by a common AI architecture become "obvious" b/c a person with ordinary skill can launch the AI which finds it in from a colab notebook?

Re: South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

#70

Post by Planktonne »

Closi wrote: post #67
himinlomax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said AI patents are an issue, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet. The 1981 ZX81 Chess program that ran in 1kiB of RAM would have astonished a 19th century observer and would have qualified as "artificial intelligence" from their point of view. What's currently called "AI" is not that much different from that program. Claiming it has somehow any kind of personhood is just nonsensical, and probably…

> What's currently called "AI" is not that much different from that program. It's pretty significantly different to that program, both in terms of scope, complexity and output. I'm going to assume by "person" we mean some kind of intelligence which appears to be self-aware, or that can interact with humans to make it difficult to distinguish between human and machine (what's a human in terms of thinking, if a machine…

It's significantly different in degree, but not in kind.

Modern ML is vastly more complex, capable, and widely-applicable than the first chess programs, but it's not intelligent, and doesn't have any greater ability to be 'considered a person'.

An aeroplane is a much more complex, capable, and widely-applicable vehicle than a bicycle, but it's no more human or more generally intelligent.

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