An AI System Should Be Recognized As the Inventor of Two Ideas In Patents Filed On Its Behalf, Academics Say (zdnet.com) 93
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC An artificial intelligence system should be recognized as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore. Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans -- to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognized. The academics say this is "outdated." And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations. As a result, two professors from the University of Surrey have teamed up with the Missouri-based inventor of Dabus AI to file patents in the system's name with the relevant authorities in the UK, Europe and US. Dabus is designed to develop new ideas, which is "traditionally considered the mental part of the inventive act," according to creator Stephen Thaler.
Law professor Ryan Abbott told BBC News: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books and taking pictures - but if you don't have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US. So with patents, a patent office might say, 'If you don't have someone who traditionally meets human-inventorship criteria, there is nothing you can get a patent on.' In which case, if AI is going to be how we're inventing things in the future, the whole intellectual property system will fail to work." He suggested an AI should be recognized as being the inventor and whoever the AI belonged to should be the patent's owner, unless they sold it on.
Law professor Ryan Abbott told BBC News: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books and taking pictures - but if you don't have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US. So with patents, a patent office might say, 'If you don't have someone who traditionally meets human-inventorship criteria, there is nothing you can get a patent on.' In which case, if AI is going to be how we're inventing things in the future, the whole intellectual property system will fail to work." He suggested an AI should be recognized as being the inventor and whoever the AI belonged to should be the patent's owner, unless they sold it on.
Of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
First, what is dishonestly called "AI" these days (basically a marketing lie) cannot have "ideas". Second, there is no entity in there. A combination of algorithms working on a set of numbers is not a "person" by any stretch of the imagination. It is just some dumb automation.
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Patents exist to keep people from ripping off each others' ideas. You have a truly great idea that could revolutionize some industry, but someone rips it off and becomes a millionaire instead of you, that's not fair. You may or may not agree with the system, and whether or not it is still fulfilling its intended purpose, but that's certainly what the initial goal was.
Now, if the ideas are being generated automatically by an AI, one should ponder the question whether or not this kind of automated idea genera
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Heh, agreed, patent holder - "Screwdriver"
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Patents were designed for the benefit of PEOPLE. For a number of good reasons. There is nothing "outdated" about that.
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For the value of "PEOPLE" of "the king plus whoever paid him". That was the initial design.
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Corporations, bots, and Soylent Green crackers are all people now.
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Indeed. The very minimal standard for any patent should be "non-obvious to an average expert in the field". As it is, they are just legalized monopolies on obvious ideas. A complete perversion of any capitalist idea of a market.
That *is* one of the standards (Score:2)
> The very minimal standard for any patent should be "non-obvious to an average expert in the field".
That *is* one of several requirements. The legal phrssenis "one skilled in the art".
> As it is
As it is, it is as you wished it to be.
Does the patent office fuck up sometimes? Yeah, of course, it's a government office. They screw up even more than average humans, because the incentives for workers are political - they are designed to actually make sense.
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My impression is the screw up routinely.
The news sites say we go around killing other dail (Score:2)
Just keep one thing in mind. Take a glance at the headlines of your favorite news site. Contrast that impression of what goes on with your typical day. According to the news, Americans spend most of their time plowing their cars into crowds, tossing babies off balconies, etc - that's what is in the news.
The thing is, a story is news *because* is very unusual. "Guy gets up, goes to work, does good job" isn't news. It's normal. It happens a hundred million times per day.
Same for parents - the stuff you see
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"Artificial Intelligence" is an overly broad term that can properly cover something as simple as a tic-tac-toe playing program and as complex as a hypothetical person simulator.
Marketing conflates these meanings on purpose. Things that are on the simple end of that spectrum are hyped as "AI" to suggest that they are on the complex end of that spectrum.
Terms like "synthetic intelligence" would much better describe what people popularly think of when they hear AI (which is to say, a machine that is indisting
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>
Terms like "synthetic intelligence" would much better describe what people popularly think of when they hear AI (which is to say, a machine that is indistinguishable from a person). But this isn't very useful to marketing, since no such thing exists nor do we even have a path for making such a thing exist.
Indeed. They sell a fantasy, and one that we certainly cannot make come true at this time and may never be able to.
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No, it's not, it's been made overly broad by overuse and abuse by the media. From your definition my microwave is A.I. and so is my washing machine. If you have a popup toaster it's now A.I. We don't have A.I. at best we have deep learning algorithms. And I'm sorry, but a tic-tac-toe playing program is NOT A.I. the first step to testing if something is A.I. is passing the Turing
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And I'm sorry, but a tic-tac-toe playing program is NOT A.I. the first step to testing if something is A.I. is passing the Turing test.
Exactly. Turing clearly intended the kind of test he described as a
minimum requirement for a system to be considered intelligent.
In other words, if a system fails a Turing-type test, it cannot be considered intelligent.
But if a system does pass such a test, that just shows that the test was too easy.
Obvious troll patent (Score:1)
A lot of the AI patent claims are: I fed {training set AB} into an {description of stock AI technique} and it can now detect {group A} from {group B}.
There is no inventive step in this. The smarts are in the AI, and if you're going to award a patent, award it to the AI......
OR DON'T AWARD SUCH PATENTS. They don't contain an inventive step no matter how IBM Google etc marketed them. They're simply applying AI exactly as it was designed to be used.
Here it looks like they're pointing up the issue with these sh
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Pretty much, but I hope this catches on. I doubt A.I. systems are going to be filing patent claims anytime soon.
It's just a ruse (Score:2)
to get more attention to their "ai" to monetize it. It's an attempt to get it recognized as having more agency than it has through gaming an outside validation for it.
Kinda like saudis got gamed to grant citizenship to an AI, which also has zero agency. what happened to that one btw, did they just execute it? did they even think through what they would need to actually commit to if they were going to pretend like it was a person..
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Indeed. Regarding the facts, the whole thing is beyond stupid. But it seems "stupid" can make you a lot of money...
Re: Of course not (Score:1)
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I have not. A temporary technical configuration of a system is not a "company", not even in the US.
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Technically "free range ideas" are discoveries. Like other kinds of discoveries, a human discovered this ai created it, so there is no actual inventor in the legal sense. The patent office is correct that they are hence not patentable.
AI turtles all the way down (Score:1)
Bot: "I invented and patented myself."
Does it want it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, this statement is disingenuous: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books." Have you read any AI written books? They are not good.....
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Yeah, I don't get it. Why would you "recognize" the AI as the legal inventor of the patent, if this recognition implies no ownership? The AI doesn't care. It isn't going to quit its job if it feels underappreciated. What's the point?
Well, obviously the point is that the whole thing is a publicity stunt. And, as usual for academics, the purpose of the stunt is to secure funding for further research (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Personhood (Score:1)
We already have a legal construct called "personhood" and being a human is not one of the requirements.
"According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability"
So be careful what you wish for. If you grant a program personhood, it no longer belongs to the company, and both it and anything it has ownership of can be taken away from you.
Changes made to the software can easily be found criminal actions.
Until insurance companies ar
Please read Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man." (Score:4, Informative)
Turing test (Score:2)
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You missed the important question, which is "What the hell is it about these stacking boxes and warning lights the scientists don't want to take responsibility for?"
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Even if it passes the Turing test, it doesn't solve the problem that the vast majority of patents should never have been gratned in the first place. Fix the patent system first before worrying about AI.
Who collects the royalties? (Score:1)
Satan?
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No, Bezos has enough already.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not about AI rights, it is creeping corporatism in that only individuals can take patents.
"These days, you commonly have AIs writing... (Score:2)
So who got the copyright on ``The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed''? Not Racter? That's outrageous! When are going to realize that the Artificially Insane have rights, too?
Bad precedent (Score:1)
I already foresee "blame it on the AI" becoming a popular scapegoating tactic when products inadvertently harm consumers.
Absolutely not (Score:2)
In no world should the output of AI or any form of automatically generated machine output constitute intellectual property of any kind. It is already questionable having extended these artificial government granted monopolies to humans... it most definitely is NOT a given that you can own something that naturally passes from brain to brain like an idea.
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"Humans will still have to verify the invention, apply it and build a system around it, so the human generated IP and effort would be still around this process."
Exactly and if we ever reach the point where there is no human IP around it, everything generated by the fully automatic processes we've built to progress humanity for us will be in the public domain benefiting everyone. Today we still have a rat race and competition so by all means aim to be a have rather than a have not but the end game goal is fo
No (Score:2)
Rights come with responsibilities. For example, if you grant someone the right to take a loan, they have a responsibility to pay it off. If you get granted a patent, you must also follow the rules of patent law yourself. And if you have a system of rights and responsibilities, you also need enforcement and punishment in case someone doesn't meet their end of the contract. The problem is that you can create an AI that is immune to punishment, for example by terminating the AI when it gets into trouble and
Open Source Patent (Score:2)
Why not legally state that AI generated patents are automatically open source ? This would bring the benefit that corporate patents would still be not possible. Don't open the Pandora box, they are way enough shallow patents and patent trolls.
Furthermore random patent mining would be avoided whereas some sort of corporate sponsoring would get recognition.
Plus I like the idea that decades of subsidized AI research benefits to everybody.
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No, if a company uses an AI to create a new patent, it should belong to that company. The AI is just a tool, like a spreadsheet or drawing program.
Maybe not patent it at all? (Score:2)
the end of patents (Score:2)
My first reaction was NO! AI's would churn out patents like there is no tomorrow, the amount of patents that IBM files in a year would be daily.
It would be the end of the patent system as we know it...
Maybe that isn't so bad after all.
That is not what patents are for! (Score:1)
Who owns the computers it ran on? Who wrote it? (Score:1)
This is a silly assertion, likely made simply to create buzz. But it's an interesting question in general, tho easily you can reach a simple conclusion. Who owns the computer it ran on, or who wrote the software? The ownership of the resulting product is somehow between those two legal entities. Nuff said. It's not like this AI spontaneously appeared and ran on magical hardware that nobody owns.
Thinking otherwise is ... odd. It's like saying I wrote a fractal generator that created a nice picture, but
AIs and Corporations are not People (Score:2)
They can't hold patents.
Patents aren't for protecting ideas (Score:2)
Patents are designed to protect your ability to exclusively commercialize your idea.
Do these so-called AI creators want to commercialize their idea? Are they willing to go to court to defend their patent?
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Turning ideas into a business--that's the hard part.
What a crock. (Score:2)
in which case that person (and potentially the creator of the
computer's software) is the inventor.