It's not so impressive when you realise that South Africa is a non-examining patent issuer - patents are issued as long as all the forms are properly filled out.
A markov-chain based word-generator could just have easily gotten the patent issued, because the patent office does not examine the patent application for patentability, it only checks that the correct procedure is followed.
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
This can be done also without listing AI as the inventor. What was stopping them yesterday from generating random patents and is not stopping them today with this?
If AI just churns out a whole bunch of stuff with no known useful application that can be demonstrated in physical reality, it won't be able to patent that.
"[A] patent is not a hunting license. It is not a reward for the search, but compensation for its successful conclusion" - Brenner v. Manson [1]
In the above case, the inventor discovered a whole class of molecules. The Supreme Court said that you can't patent that because you have to show that each thing you patent can be used for something useful. Basically, the inventor couldn't just claim the whole class of molecules to keep anyone from using them and then figure out what they're good for later.
You could use AI to produce thousands of patents in a single day and put your name as the inventor - I'm not sure having the AI system recorded as inventor adds much for patent trolls.
A patent fee should keep this behaviour to a minimum...
Patents already have quite a big fee, but perhaps it should be made larger to prevent this kind of abuse. If the large fee prevents inventors, then perhaps some scheme along the lines of 'The fee is $50 for the first 5 inventions, then $100k per patent after that" might be suitable.
> 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 a publicity stunt. Why not list SPICE or your favorite finite elements solver in your patent application as a contributor?
Yeah, I think the key aspect of the story isn't that they somehow convinced the patent office, but more likely that the patent office in South Africa was the first one they tried that didn't bother to check if the people listed as inventors actually exist.
(Given that we don't have their side of the story and they are only listed as not having rejected it)
This is the patent application, as far as I can tell. And as others have noted, this is obviously a political stunt—the article makes that clear as well.
Frustratingly, it doesn't seem like there's anything interesting or useful happening in the actual patent. It would not surprise me to find that they had been rejected in part because the idea seems to be either literally impossible to implement or basically uninteresting, depending on your interpretation.
Also, as a non-lawyer, this stunt requires talking out of both sides of one's mouth. They necessarily assert that they have the authority to speak on behalf of the machine listed as the inventor in order to assign ownership of the patent, so why not just assert oneself as the inventor?
OK. Someone had to to make the obvious point. At least it's concise.
Patents, as they exist, typically list an inventor, but the owner can be different. Mostly, the inventor is an employee and the owner is the employer. Where this can get hairy is FOSS. If FOSS invents something...
I think there might be other philosophical objections. If a NN "invents" something, perhaps its unpatentable because it is (by some definition) trivial or discovery of a natural law... IE, not a creative work for patent purposes.
Ultimately, patent law and the arguments underpinning it have many avenues for philosophical "attack." But, it's a legal framework, not a philosophical one.
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.
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?
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?
Brought to you by the same government that had a leader who tried justifying spending public funds on a pool for his personal house as a "fire pool". I love SA, but their oversight overall on things like this is non-existent.
I'm not sure what this means - I thought Inventor meant owner or part owner in some sense unless the ownership has been transferred, presumably Dabus isn't a legal entity - so this is meaningless.
How is the invention of an AI any different from the result of any traditional optimization process?
Example: I searched for aerodinamics genetic algorithms and I found "Genetic algorithms applied to the aerodynamic design of transonic airfoils" https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.46810 (paywalled but that's not the point.)
Rename genetic algorithms into Multi Generational AI and is the Patent Office going to accept a patent for those airfoils with the AI as the inventor?
[+] [-] lelanthran|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bowmanslaw.com/insights/intellectual-property/so...
A markov-chain based word-generator could just have easily gotten the patent issued, because the patent office does not examine the patent application for patentability, it only checks that the correct procedure is followed.
[+] [-] rafaelturk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unyttigfjelltol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|4 years ago|reply
"[A] patent is not a hunting license. It is not a reward for the search, but compensation for its successful conclusion" - Brenner v. Manson [1]
In the above case, the inventor discovered a whole class of molecules. The Supreme Court said that you can't patent that because you have to show that each thing you patent can be used for something useful. Basically, the inventor couldn't just claim the whole class of molecules to keep anyone from using them and then figure out what they're good for later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_v._Manson
[+] [-] easytiger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h0l0cube|4 years ago|reply
This is only a problem if the AI is litigious. Surely an AI with true agency would be keep the patent rights to themselves
[+] [-] cowl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|4 years ago|reply
Patents already have quite a big fee, but perhaps it should be made larger to prevent this kind of abuse. If the large fee prevents inventors, then perhaps some scheme along the lines of 'The fee is $50 for the first 5 inventions, then $100k per patent after that" might be suitable.
[+] [-] ISL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|4 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] himinlomax|4 years ago|reply
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 a publicity stunt. Why not list SPICE or your favorite finite elements solver in your patent application as a contributor?
[+] [-] st_goliath|4 years ago|reply
(Given that we don't have their side of the story and they are only listed as not having rejected it)
[+] [-] pfundstein|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmpb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisrhoden|4 years ago|reply
This is the patent application, as far as I can tell. And as others have noted, this is obviously a political stunt—the article makes that clear as well.
Frustratingly, it doesn't seem like there's anything interesting or useful happening in the actual patent. It would not surprise me to find that they had been rejected in part because the idea seems to be either literally impossible to implement or basically uninteresting, depending on your interpretation.
Also, as a non-lawyer, this stunt requires talking out of both sides of one's mouth. They necessarily assert that they have the authority to speak on behalf of the machine listed as the inventor in order to assign ownership of the patent, so why not just assert oneself as the inventor?
[+] [-] ENGNR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
Patents, as they exist, typically list an inventor, but the owner can be different. Mostly, the inventor is an employee and the owner is the employer. Where this can get hairy is FOSS. If FOSS invents something...
I think there might be other philosophical objections. If a NN "invents" something, perhaps its unpatentable because it is (by some definition) trivial or discovery of a natural law... IE, not a creative work for patent purposes.
Ultimately, patent law and the arguments underpinning it have many avenues for philosophical "attack." But, it's a legal framework, not a philosophical one.
[+] [-] arsome|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maybe_pablo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spark3k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skywhopper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bencollier49|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abeppu|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bencollier49|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karliss|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] epc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lgleason|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gitgud|4 years ago|reply
AI software isn't like any legal entity that currently exists. Software can be duplicated instantly, people and companies cannot.
[+] [-] Paddywack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|4 years ago|reply
Example: I searched for aerodinamics genetic algorithms and I found "Genetic algorithms applied to the aerodynamic design of transonic airfoils" https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.46810 (paywalled but that's not the point.)
Rename genetic algorithms into Multi Generational AI and is the Patent Office going to accept a patent for those airfoils with the AI as the inventor?
[+] [-] himinlomax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shoto_io|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] studentrob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nceqs3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uCantCauseUCant|4 years ago|reply
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