AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

Posted by mushstory 7 hours ago

AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules(japannews.yomiuri.co.jp)

290 points | 158 commentspage 3

zuzululu 4 hours ago|

This is fixable by simply replacing the AI with a human I dont think the laws catch or can determine the differences

urig 2 hours ago||

Obvs

threethirtytwo 4 hours ago||

Well who invented it then? User of said AI or owner of said AI or no one?

cmiles8 6 hours ago||

This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

grim_io 6 hours ago||

That's not how I understand it.

AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor.

Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.

otterley 2 hours ago|||

The US Copyright Office disagrees. No work produced by a mechanical process, which includes LLMs, can be protected by copyright.

dwa3592 6 hours ago|||

>>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain

They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.

grim_io 6 hours ago||

Exactly, like any AI tool ever.

Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.

recursive 5 hours ago||

How will you know when that happens? Or are you defining interests so narrowly that it's definitionally impossible?

grim_io 5 hours ago||

If you are arguing that there is consciousness that's emerging from LLM's, I have to disagree on that.

We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.

recursive 4 hours ago||

No. I'm not saying anything about consciousness.

Does a gradient descent algorithm pursue its interest of minimizing error? Does a home automation assistant pursue its interests when it sets my thermostat? I'm not super interested in the definition of "consciousness" or "interests". However, a thermostat setpoint has effects that are visible in the real world. That's a thing that happened, regardless whether you consider it to have happened in "the pursuit of an interest".

I'm saying that LLMs are affecting the world. And sometimes those effects might be difficult or impossible to trace back to a particular prompt written by a particular human. Chatbot input and output doesn't have to be in the form of text i/o. You can put them in a for loop. Remember OpenClaw?

> We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.

There might exist an incentive to make it hard to see.

Robotbeat 6 hours ago|||

That isn’t what the courts have decided. They just decided it has to be a human on the patent application name. You can use whatever tool you want to get there, but if you patent a thing, it has to be a human in the name.

cmiles8 6 hours ago||

I think we’re saying the same thing. If you’re using AI as a tool to support human creative content that’s one thing. But what courts are pushing back on is trying to patent/protect content where the core creator was AI. That’s what most people mean when they say “AI slop.” There courts are consistently saying you can’t protect this.

Robotbeat 6 hours ago||

No. The court is saying you cannot assign IP rights to an AI, as this guy was trying to do. They are not saying it cannot be protected (as /r/antiai folk are always claiming). That’s another thing.

cmiles8 6 hours ago||

If you can’t protect it as copyright (which the US and others have separately said) then how are you “protecting” it? It’s not IP.

Robotbeat 6 hours ago|||

That isn’t precisely what was decided in those cases, either (even though this gets repeated constantly on the internet as if it was). Again, the fundamental point of this case (and some similar cases) is just that you cannot assign IP to an AI. It has to be assigned to a person.

dcrazy 6 hours ago||||

The ruling does not say whether or not the invention would be patentable had the appellant put his own name on the application.

otterley 2 hours ago||

If a person lists himself as the author but an LLM produces the work, they’re defrauding the government, which is a crime.

dcrazy 58 minutes ago||

Er, no.

_flux 5 hours ago|||

You can't assign the copyright to Emacs either, yet it can be used to produce software.

natebc 6 hours ago|||

> Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

I haven't been able to square this belief (This is what i believe too.) with what I perceive as so, so many people making projects, putting them on github and slapping an MIT/GPL license on them.

If IP rights can't be applied to generated code then how are they able to apply a such a license to them?

I've asked this before and the response was along the lines of people thinking their multiple prompting amounted to human creative process and therefore it was covered but ... how? Any lawyers around that can ELI5 it for us? Maybe links to a lawyer somewhere who did?

rolph 6 hours ago|||

a person publishing as if a AI is the creator is publishing under a pseudonym.

AI has all the IP rights of a pen, pencil, chalk, or crayon.

Robotbeat 6 hours ago|||

Because the “AI slop is uncopyrightable” people are misunderstanding court rulings like this. It’s not that AI output can’t by protected by IP, it’s that AI is not a person and so you can’t assign IP rights to it. You CAN assign IP rights to the human who did it (if they can show it’s non-trivial, like a haiku or photographer).

natebc 5 hours ago||

This is the bit in the copyright offices' report that i'm trying to square:

>The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output.

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

Robotbeat 5 hours ago||

In January 2025. It’s also not a court decision, effectively an executive branch directive.

otterley 2 hours ago||

The Copyright Office hasn’t changed its analysis, and courts will likely defer to it when they’re asked to settle a dispute about it.

LoganDark 6 hours ago|||

It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.

ReptileMan 6 hours ago||

Your ai slop is effectively something you own, because you wrote the prompt.

kube-system 3 hours ago||

If sufficiently creative enough to qualify. Which applies to copyright regardless of the tools you use.

nekusar 5 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 hours ago|||

You cant make a man understand the moral compass when his salary bla bla bla...

javcasas 6 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 6 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.

pfdietz 4 hours ago|

If an AI can invent something then it should be considered obvious.

sebastianconcpt 3 hours ago||

The problem is that you have creations that aren't really obvious. Have you seen that rocket engine with a crazy laborious design made with an AI?

Frost1x 4 hours ago||

AI use is slowly creeping into pure mathematics and proving theorems or providing legging to mathematical breakthroughs. Just go watch some Terrance Tao videos to see some recent work. In addition, theorem provers and the likes have been around for awhile. Some of these systems create novel ideas or bridge novel ideas in ways that are arguably not “obvious” in any sense of the term.

While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view.

I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.

pfdietz 4 hours ago||

No, I mean legally they should be considered obvious, as the difficulty to create them becomes small. It makes no sense to give someone a monopoly on an idea that anyone could get just by prompting an AI.

Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)

Lerc 3 hours ago||

That's ease, not obviousness.

I think if an AI solves a problem that has been known and unsolved for a substantial period of time dispute attempts then the solution could only be considered non obvious.

If we make AI that can do 6 of these things before breakfast then we should think of them as easy to obtain.

The distinction is that non-obious to a human was a property that denoted a degree of specialness. If AI could do those things with ease then they cease to be special.

It was that factor that led people to be awarded some form of monopoly over the creation. But if it is no longer particularly special, then it should be public domain.