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Posted by mushstory 6 hours ago

AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules(japannews.yomiuri.co.jp)
252 points | 130 commentspage 2
sim04ful 4 hours ago|
One thing i've got to wonder. Would this always remain the case, at what point should society seriously consider the "personhood" of an AI (as a noun).
saghm 3 hours ago||
I agree with the other top-level comment next to yours (at the time of writing): when we're willing to enforce consequences for them in the same way we would for people. If I violate laws, I can get put in jail, and then I (most likely) can't use any computers until I get out. To consider an AI a person, it needs to have legal liability in the same way a fleshy person does.
echoangle 4 hours ago|||
If there’s a consensus that AI is sentient and conscious and there are ways it can act autonomously, probably.
Mountain_Skies 3 hours ago|||
Corporate personhood has already been disastrous enough. We don't need to compound it with AI personhood on top.
s0ss 4 hours ago|||
Consciousness?
phyzome 2 hours ago||
Eh. No one has been able to prove to my satisfaction that they're conscious, or even simply define what it is that they claim to possess. Pick something else.
grantcas 2 hours ago||
[dead]
lp4v4n 4 hours ago||
In my opinion, no jurisdiction in the world would be able to approve AI as an inventor on patent applications.

And for a very simple reason: you could easily overwhelm any intellectual property bureau just by having your AI drown them in AI slop. Even if most of these patents get refused, just refusing a patent is a lot of work, I imagine.

kube-system 2 hours ago||
How would you even recognize the assignment of property rights to a big box of numbers?

And even if you did, it's entirely inanimate, how would it even exercise them?

ipaddr 3 hours ago|||
Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.
woah 4 hours ago||
This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.
jordanpg 3 hours ago||
The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.

To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].

The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.

That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.

[1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/

[2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

latexr 3 hours ago||
If you’re in the EEA or UK and reject the tracking, you can still use your browser’s Reader Mode to read the text. Or on the console:

  document.getElementById("consentModal").remove()
  document.getElementById("tpModal").remove()
zuzululu 3 hours ago||
This is fixable by simply replacing the AI with a human I dont think the laws catch or can determine the differences
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago||
Well who invented it then? User of said AI or owner of said AI or no one?
graemep 4 hours ago||
> Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

This ruling, like most in other countries, seems to support the position that a human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance:

"The Patent Office ordered the plaintiff to provide the name of a person as the inventor. The plaintiff refused to do so, and the application was rejected."

thewebguyd 4 hours ago|
> human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance

Not sure about patents in the US but irt copyright, only the parts that are not LLM output are copyrightable. All LLM output is automatically public domain.

So if you have a work that was done with AI assistance, only the pieces of that work that are human authored can be subject to copyright. The AI parts cannot, if there are any.

I think it's long past time we get rid of the silly idea of intellectual property all together. If AI has the potential to do any good in the world in its current form, its that.

kube-system 2 hours ago|||
> All LLM output is automatically public domain.

That is not exactly true under US law. You're simplifying what the copyright office has said to the point where you're missing the key points of what they were trying to convey.

The copyright office has affirmed multiple times that whether or not you use an LLM is irrelevant. Copyright eligibility requires "sufficient human-authored expressive elements". It doesn't matter what tools you use -- an LLM, a troop of trained monkeys, etc.

Ultimately all that matters is whether or not the human creativity involved qualifies. Because copyright is ultimately a right that protects human creativity.

So yes, if you put "write me a book" into ChatGPT -- that clearly does not quality for copyright. "Write me a book" itself is not creative enough for copyright.

Now on the other hand, if you spend 1000 hours writing a book, and you run it through ChatGPT for suggestions and/or edits -- there is no reason why that LLM output would not qualify.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

graemep 2 hours ago|||
Yes, provided you can separate the two (e.g. a book and illustrations in one case). AFAIK the courts have still not ruled on what happens when AI and human contributions cannot be separated etc.

It varies a lot in other countries, but in most (if not all) an AI cannot hold a copyright.

kube-system 2 hours ago||
AI isn't a legal entity that can do anything, let alone hold a copyright. It is an inanimate box of numbers.

The only two things that can transact with any legal system in any way are humans and groups of humans.

graemep 1 hour ago|||
But a human can hold the copyright on the output of an AI - but the requirements for that are not clear in the US yet. They are clear in the UK but the government is thinking of changing the law.
kube-system 1 hour ago||
A human can hold the copyright for anything for which they've contributed the requisite level of authorship and creativity. There are no tooling requirements or prohibitions.
krapp 2 hours ago|||
That should be obvious but unfortunately lots of people believe (or have a vested interest in pretending to believe) LLMs are living, thinking, sentient entities and that belief is going to influence the politics and legislation around AI to some unknown degree.
kube-system 2 hours ago||
Hearing otherwise intelligent people anthropomorphize AI in legal arguments makes me realize why lawyers advise everyone just to shut their mouths and ask a lawyer.
nekusar 4 hours ago||
Thats why *SOME* humans will still be needed. They'll be accountability sinks when (NOT IF) the AI in charge goes off the rails. The human will then be summarily be blamed.

This is how the reverse centaur operation works. LLMs suck and not work in increasingly bad ways, and the companies who sell them treat them as one would buy psychic services (read: entertainment). So they need a token human to person-wash this slop.

panny 5 hours ago|
I really can't understand the moral compass of people who would pirate other peoples' works under "fair use" to train AI, only to turn around and try to claim ownership of them when AI regurgitates it.
john_strinlai 4 hours ago||
note that this was in 2020 (pre-chatgpt), with the author's own "ai", "DABUS", and it appears that the author wanted solely DABUS to be listed as the patent holder, which does not seem to indicate any insane greed or whatever.

the likelihood of one single guy having the same data scraping & storage capabilities as the big players, years before them (i see info about DABUS back to 2018), is slim.

Aerroon 4 hours ago|||
Because AI doesn't just regurgitate it. Make up a new word and ask ChatGPT use it in a sentence - you've now got a brand new sentence that was not in its training data. If it only regurgitated data then it wouldn't be able to use that word in a sentence.

The same applies to image generation - they can generate images that almost certainly were not in the training data.

johnbarron 5 hours ago|||
You cant make a man understand the moral compass when his salary bla bla bla...
javcasas 4 hours ago||
Don't forget exceptionalism: this is so disgustingly wrong... except when I do it. In my case it is moral and perfectly justified.
rvz 4 hours ago||
The truth is as long as there is competition, having morals does not exist in the tech/crypto/ai industries given the goal is to make money. That’s it.

Only after the participant has completed their grift or extraction operation then they begin virtue signalling their ‘morals’. It is fake.

If you are here for asserting morals, this is the wrong industry.

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