[fromthestart]

>Do current patent laws and regulations regarding inventorship need to be revised to take into account inventions where an entity or entities other than a natural person contributed to the conception of an invention

Well, this seems a little dangerous. I would argue that any invention or innovation generated by an AI should be made public domain.

As we rapidly approach the possibility of genuine AI, the gap between the haves and have nots will increasingly be defined not by accumulation of capital but by accumulation and control of information. If the explosion of technical progress we've seen in ML recently continues, it's quite likely that future designs and breakthroughs will eventually come from neural nets themselves - and if we define these innovations as IP and afford the usual legal protections to the nets that generated them, as the question seems to imply ("other than natural persons"), then I imagine by proxy the ultimate owner of the patent is the owner of the net. Which forms the foundation of a dystopia defined by unprecedented "wealth" inequality where one or a handful of first movers become irreversibly entrenched as the gap between AI powered innovation and human powered innovation will widen exponentially once that door is unlocked.

I think much of the progress in the ML explosion is owed to the beauty of open source and open access publishing on arxiv, and I can't help but feel like getting neural network designs mixed up with patent law would stymie the iterative collaboration that defines ML research.