US Supreme Court Declines to Take Up Lawsuit Over Patents for AI-Generated Inventions
U.S. patent law unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings.
Last month, a computer scientist seeking or patent coverage for inventions conceived by his artificial intelligence system asked the U.S. Supreme Court hear his case.
Stephen Thaler petitioned the high court to review an appeals court’s decision that patents can only be issued to human inventors and that his AI system cannot be the legal creator of inventions it generated.
Thaler said in his brief that AI is being used to innovate in fields ranging from medicine to energy, and that rejecting AI-generated patents “curtails our patent system’s ability — and thwarts Congress’s intent — to optimally stimulate innovation and technological progress.”
Thaler has said that his DABUS system, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, generated unique prototypes for a beverage holder and light beacon on its own.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and a Virginia federal court rejected patent applications for the inventions on the grounds that DABUS is not a person. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld those decisions last year and said U.S. patent law unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings.
SCOTUS declined to take up his case.
The justices turned away Thaler’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that he has said it generated.
…Thaler told the Supreme Court that AI is being used to innovate in fields ranging from medicine to energy, and that rejecting AI-generated patents “curtails our patent system’s ability – and thwarts Congress’s intent – to optimally stimulate innovation and technological progress.”
Thaler’s supporters in his case at the Supreme Court include Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig and other academics who said in a brief that the Federal Circuit’s decision “jeopardizes billions (of dollars) in current and future investments, threatens U.S. competitiveness and reaches a result at odds with the plain language of the Patent Act.”
Perhaps Thaler should claim his AI identifies as a human being?
While that may be sad news for invention-oriented AI-users, there might be a little good news for those of us who want some real entertainment that doesn’t insult the intelligence.
We may be seeing AI-generated movies coming out in 2 years!
As artificial intelligence continues to disrupt the entertainment industry, many moviegoers have been left wondering at what point AI will be creating full feature films. According to Joe Russo, co-director of Marvel movies such as “Avengers: Endgame” and “Avengers: Infinity War,” that time could be coming in two years.
“I’m on the board of a few AI companies,” Russo told Collider. “I’m gonna speak from my experience of being on the board of those companies, [so] there are AI companies that are developing AI to protect you from AI. And unfortunately, we’re in that world, and you will need an AI in your life because whether we want to see it developed or not, people who are not friendly to us may develop it anyways. So, we’re going to be in that future. The question is, then, how we protect ourselves in that future?”
When asked in “how many years” AI will be able to “actually create” a movie, Russo predicted: “Two years.”
Here’s hoping that the AI-created films don’t go all in on woke content! And while woke inputs will create woke output, AI can be edited to produce alternative fare that would be impossible to produce in today’s Hollywood.
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Comments
So, copyright?
Same problem – AI apparently can’t be authors either. Plus, the idea/expression dichotomy, which essentially requires filtration of functional material from copyright protection.
“many moviegoers have been left wondering at what point AI will be creating full feature films”
Getting tired of the ones being released by Xerox machines with faulty toner settings?
“Perhaps Thaler should claim his AI identifies as a human being?”
This is off topic, but it’s a pet peeve of mine. That’s not a question. Use a period, not a question mark.
I feel better now.
Should Thaler, perhaps, claim his AI identifies as a human being?
Fixed it, although I read it fine the first time. A pet peeve of mine in nit picking.
More A.I. crap. A.I. is certainly “Artificial” but hardly intelligent. Well, it’s no more intelligent than its creators, who are human and have an agenda. A.I. creates nothing and contemplates nothing. It is a total slave to its human creators. It is a very large program with an enormous database and with randomization features that can mimic creativity, but it is only running programmed scenarios, possible combinations, and “what ifs”, faster than a human can.
I worry much more about the humans behind the programs.
If Mr. Thaler serves as an example, then H.S. (Human Stupidity), is much more frightening than A.I.
Right now, AI rips-off human creations on the Internet. In time, it wont’ need them because AI will be generating its own.
Forget AI generated movies: there will soon be AI generated Hollywood idiots.
We’ve been using computers to sift data for decades. We don’t grant patents to the computers.
Michele Blodrin makes a good case that there shouldn’t be patents at all
https://www.econtalk.org/boldrin-on-intellectual-property/
entertaining podcast
Boldrin
OK, so the AI-generated ‘ideas’ can’t be patented because AI is not human.
But this also raises interesting questions… if the AI ‘thinks’ of it first does that make it a pre-existing idea or something that is ‘obvious’ and therefore unpatentable by a human?
You watch: AI will be filing lawsuits for copyright infringment.
I have a half dozen patents and don’t understand any of them. It’s hard to guess what difference AI would make.
Isn’t It peculiar and unusual that there is a heightened awareness and talk show hosts expressing concerns around AI over the past week throughout various media channels? Everybody is talking about AI.
Then, it dawned on me why. It was the hype leading up to the launch.
The Democrats were excited yesterday to announce they are running an incumbent president for reelection—a feeble, corrupt and old white man with artificial intelligence.
AI is hot because ChatGPT confused a lot of people into thinking it was intelligent. It’s not – it’s just a giant averaging machine that produces text that looks like the average of all of the other pertinent text it found on the Internet – but if you’re a journalist or an idiot (BIRM), it all looks alike.
It’s possible that AI-generated movies will exist in a few years. I’m not sure that it won’t be an improvement over the current crop of superhero repeat-a-thons, but at least the next generation of AI bots-in-training will watch them.
I detest the word “AI”. AI doesn’t exist, and this silly obsession with programmed tools is a fad that will fade. That is to say people will soon tire over the romanticization of these programs, but the programs are here to stay as a tool. And I have zero interest in AI generated movies. They will reflect the programmers viewpoints. Again, there is nothing AI in this “AI”.
Not a lawyer, but not sure what the problem is.
AI software (currently) is no more “a person” than a spreadsheet or any other software is.
It’s a tool you can use to do analysis and support your own innovation.
If you use ‘AI’ to generate plans for a doohickey, and the doohickey would be patentable if you designed it without the software file for a patent under your own name.
He needs to just claim it as his own. If a University or Corporation hires researchers they do not patent the discoveries under the name of the researcher, they patent it under the name of the university or Corp paying them. Same principle here, you own the AI you own its discoveries.
Read “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the age of Artificial Intelligence” by Paul Scharre. If you are rational, what it can do right now will scare the bejesus out of you.