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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 The academics say this is "outdated."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.
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An AI System Should Be Recognized As the Inventor of Two Ideas In Patents Filed On Its Behalf, Academics Say

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  • Of course not (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @07:48PM (#59026256)

    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.

    • Agree.

      Patents were designed for the benefit of PEOPLE. For a number of good reasons. There is nothing "outdated" about that.
    • The other point to make is that stackable containers and flashing lights should not be patent-able, not matter what "innovation" this guy claims his AI did.
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        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.

        • > 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.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            My impression is the screw up routinely.

            • 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

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "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

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        >

        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.

      • "Artificial Intelligence" is an overly broad term that can properly cover something as simple as a tic-tac-toe playing program

        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

        • 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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      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

    • by ChoGGi ( 522069 )

      Pretty much, but I hope this catches on. I doubt A.I. systems are going to be filing patent claims anytime soon.

    • 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..

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. Regarding the facts, the whole thing is beyond stupid. But it seems "stupid" can make you a lot of money...

    • You have described a company. A company is a legal person according to citizens United. Ergo, the ai is a person with the right to patent.
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I have not. A temporary technical configuration of a system is not a "company", not even in the US.

    • by dyfet ( 154716 )

      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.

  • Bot: "I invented and patented myself."

  • Does it want it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @08:05PM (#59026308) Journal
    Does the AI want the recognition? If it can't answer that question directly, why do you think your AI wants a patent?

    Also, this statement is disingenuous: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books." Have you read any AI written books? They are not good.....
    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      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).

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • by ccady ( 569355 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @08:11PM (#59026328) Journal
    Please read Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
  • When it can pass the Turing test (as a bare minimum) I might call it A.I. and perhaps then it might get it's name on a patent. But this is like asking for "Adobe" to be put on the patent. Or "AutoDesk". Or maybe we should put the current lead developer of "Autodesk" as the patent holder. WTF? Same as the current definition of A.I. has gone so far off track that science media has had to call it "true A.I." to differentiate between the media hype. Actually when it can pick it's own name (and no not some
    • 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?"

    • 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.

  • No (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Martin S. ( 98249 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @09:02PM (#59026446) Journal

    This is not about AI rights, it is creeping corporatism in that only individuals can take patents.

  • ``... books and taking pictures - but if you don't have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US.''

    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?

  • I already foresee "blame it on the AI" becoming a popular scapegoating tactic when products inadvertently harm consumers.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • Release the ideas to the public? Spur innovation? Maybe others will figure out how to use the ideas?
  • 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.

  • These academics are completely misunderstanding the purpose of patents. A patent forces the inventor to share the invention with the public. In order to create an incentive for the inventor to do so, we give him/her exclusive rights for a period of time to make some money on it. Does that concept apply at all to an AI? On top of that, an AI has no legal status. Is it a person? Is it a corporation? No! The AI is the property of a person or a corporation. If I use tools, algorithms, etc. to invent something
  • 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

  • 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.

  • Computers don't create inventions unless a person directs them to,
    in which case that person (and potentially the creator of the
    computer's software) is the inventor.

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