I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

This appears to be confusing patent inventors with patent owners. It’s the latter who benefit and presumably are accountable for the use of the patent and potential plagiarism.

Broadly speaking, IP law generally exists to protect the rights of humans. The law doesn't generally recognize that inanimate objects have rights.

The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

>"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."

implies that if he provided his name as the inventor, the application may not have been rejected.

Oh, please let it be the second option. Let AI be the thing that kills the "intellectual property" because humans will never manage to shake off that terribly wrong decision by themselves.

>The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra.

No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection.

>only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

> from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts

Formally speaking, it's not the case, though this is commonly misunderstood. Statistical models are definitionally ampliative, otherwise they wouldn't be statistical. One can argue about it until they're blue in the face, but it almost always comes down to a misunderstanding of what the models are, what the mathematics behind them is a description of, and what the underlying logical structures represent.

The thing is that the position and objection to these models isn't actually a substantial, reasoned position where the words have a direct meaning. Though it's dressed up like reason, it's not the point. It's a kind of metaphor. This actually does reflect the nature of intellectual property law. The legal framework is knowingly illogical at an object-level, because the end its seeking is completely divorced from the means. It has to be, because the idea of intellectual property is absolutely unjustifiable in-and-of-itself. It's just a useful legal fiction to make sure people are getting paid by commoditizing ideation. That's not a bad thing, it just means you have to be mindful that bottom-up reason will lead you astray when dealing with it.

You're absolutely right!

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.

What I want to see is patent officers using AI to label patent applications as "not novel" if the AI can invent it.

But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...

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.

If there’s a consensus that AI is sentient and conscious and there are ways it can act autonomously, probably.

Corporate personhood has already been disastrous enough. We don't need to compound it with AI personhood on top.

Consciousness?

Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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