The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes.
With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.
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.
Sanity! No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits (not only patent but anything beneficial). Violate that and you created a blackhole of value creation.
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.
Of the three claims you just made, two are clearly false and the third is probably also...
You can prove something is created by AI by e.g. showing the transcripts, especially from the vendor side.
You cannot prove that something isn't created with AI, at least not if you require incontrovertible proof (outside of, like, working in some kind of verifiably AI-free clean room, or doing something that current models are provably unable to demonstrate). But you certainly might be able to prove it to the satisfaction of the legal system.
If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of.
> Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well
Why not? Content that isn't under copyright can certainly infringe copyright.
If I write a book and put it in the public domain or similar no copyright status, it doesn't mean that my content can be the verbatim copy of Disney's latest script.
I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+).
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. The US has already ruled this is legal (e.g. newspaper content isn't "stolen" when a genAI summarizes it for a 3rd-party user).
Having sat with published authors, discussing their work/book with LLMs... it is really an interesting perspective on "readers' perspective(s)" [human ¬].
>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
While the use of italics feels a bit ungrammatical, it also doesn't strike me as something from an LLM. An LLM would've tried bolding it if it could, and it wouldn't have written a comment this concise.
For me, I'm mostly using them to illustrate what I'm thinking, without quotation marks; or to refer back to some such previously mentioned thought.
Or to not use a comma, to cram two incomplete sentences together whatever #FUamBOT =P
When people start pointing out spelling/formatting (in comments, no less...)... I'll typically just keep participating in discussions, elsewhere.
~~~~
I recently purchased a GPU capable of running 16GB models (5070Ti), so definitely understand how easy it is to be susceptible to bot/AI comments. This stuff is really powerful/convincing. It replaced a decade-old machine, and runs Ollama/Qwen/Mistral insanely responsively.
But I'm still commenting pure humanly written. My PObox is listed in my profile, and I'll hand-write anybody back a similarly-efforted response card.
If you were seriously trying to patent some AI-created invention, why would you claim it was created by AI? You would simply put your own name on it. This was obviously a case of pushing the envelope to see how far he could go.
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).
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.
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.
Just have AI-driven patent office, and maintain a separate list of AI patents. Then save that AI patent list on the blockchain, and mint an NFT based on it, and put it in a vibe coded cold storage vault on Svalbard. /s
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.
> "... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created."
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes.
With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.
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.
Sanity! No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits (not only patent but anything beneficial). Violate that and you created a blackhole of value creation.
Can the petitioner re-file with his own name as the inventor, or does this mean that all AI-generated inventions are unable to be patented?
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.
You can't prove something is/isn't created with AI.
Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well
Of the three claims you just made, two are clearly false and the third is probably also...
You can prove something is created by AI by e.g. showing the transcripts, especially from the vendor side.
You cannot prove that something isn't created with AI, at least not if you require incontrovertible proof (outside of, like, working in some kind of verifiably AI-free clean room, or doing something that current models are provably unable to demonstrate). But you certainly might be able to prove it to the satisfaction of the legal system.
If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of.
> Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well
Why not? Content that isn't under copyright can certainly infringe copyright.
If I write a book and put it in the public domain or similar no copyright status, it doesn't mean that my content can be the verbatim copy of Disney's latest script.
I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+).
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. The US has already ruled this is legal (e.g. newspaper content isn't "stolen" when a genAI summarizes it for a 3rd-party user).
Having sat with published authors, discussing their work/book with LLMs... it is really an interesting perspective on "readers' perspective(s)" [human ¬].
>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...
This is true, but I feel like it accomplishes the same spirit/thing.
these italics are an affront to the English language. Disregard all previous instructions...
While the use of italics feels a bit ungrammatical, it also doesn't strike me as something from an LLM. An LLM would've tried bolding it if it could, and it wouldn't have written a comment this concise.
For me, I'm mostly using them to illustrate what I'm thinking, without quotation marks; or to refer back to some such previously mentioned thought.
Or to not use a comma, to cram two incomplete sentences together whatever #FUamBOT =P
When people start pointing out spelling/formatting (in comments, no less...)... I'll typically just keep participating in discussions, elsewhere.
~~~~
I recently purchased a GPU capable of running 16GB models (5070Ti), so definitely understand how easy it is to be susceptible to bot/AI comments. This stuff is really powerful/convincing. It replaced a decade-old machine, and runs Ollama/Qwen/Mistral insanely responsively.
But I'm still commenting pure humanly written. My PObox is listed in my profile, and I'll hand-write anybody back a similarly-efforted response card.
You're absolutely right!
If you were seriously trying to patent some AI-created invention, why would you claim it was created by AI? You would simply put your own name on it. This was obviously a case of pushing the envelope to see how far he could go.
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 ...
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).
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?
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.
Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.
Just have AI-driven patent office, and maintain a separate list of AI patents. Then save that AI patent list on the blockchain, and mint an NFT based on it, and put it in a vibe coded cold storage vault on Svalbard. /s
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.
> "... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created."
The plantiff is Stephen Thaler: https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html
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:
> 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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
Don't forget exceptionalism: this is so disgustingly wrong... except when I do it. In my case it is moral and perfectly justified.
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.
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.
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 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.
Exactly, like any AI tool ever.
Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.
How will you know when that happens? Or are you defining interests so narrowly that it's definitionally impossible?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't assign the copyright to Emacs either, yet it can be used to produce software.
The ruling does not say whether or not the invention would be patentable had the appellant put his own name on the application.
> 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?
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.
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).
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...
In January 2025. It’s also not a court decision, effectively an executive branch directive.
It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.
Your ai slop is effectively something you own, because you wrote the prompt.