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

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• I grew up around Carl Sagan.

  My Dad and his brother were engineers, materials science and aerospace respectively.

  The Voyager stories and the Golden Record were pivotal artifacts in forming my young mind. This idea of not just a possible national unity but intergalactic.

  Maybe there were other messages on the Voyager that were more threatening. Maybe I'm naive.

  But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too.

  If nothing else, aliens listening to these kinds of results may form a very different idea of humanity.

  I'm sure these rulings will be revisited after AGI. But AGI is coming. I wouldn't have believed it five years ago, but I do now.

  We will have some critical mistakes made by pre-AGI AI in the coming few years. In healthcare and automobiles and aeronautics and other fields. Millions or billions will die or could suffer. Buf it will be used to slur and slander those unborn AGI systems. It is a horrible strategy that isn't an accident.

  I understand AI is a potential threat to humanity. But why did we say hello to space. But we said you don't have rights to these new beings we helped create?

  It's a disturbing question.

  by jgerrish
• > But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too.

  I don't know how else to put this but it sounds like you're suffering from AI Psychosis. A bunch of floating point numbers in a file does not have a conscience, cannot feel emotion, and has no morals.

  The entire point of AI (or even the mythical non-existent AGI everyone keeps insisting will be around "soon") was to make life for humanity easier, and as someone who uses these tools almost daily, my life isn't improved at all, neither that of my colleagues, family, or friends n=~30.

  We were promised unlimited abundance, freedom from labour, and all of the fruits that come with it. I 100% support this court decision and hold that any and all progress sans contact with an extra-terrestrial lifeform should be attributed to the humans it belongs to

  by waterTanuki
• While I am unfamiliar with Japanese patent law, this would certainly be sound under the American system. Two requirements for patentability are novelty and non-obviousness, meaning the idea does not already exist nor is it such a trivial modification of an existing idea that anyone knowledgeable in the subject could come up with it. Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set. They might be a useful tool for an inventor, but the creative spark which patents protect can not come from them.
  by jjk166

•   > Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set
  
  

  What? Have you used modern frontier models? I find it very hard to believe you could interact with them much and maintain this level of misapprehension.
  by semiquaver
• 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.
  by panny
• 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.

  by rvz
• You cant make a man understand the moral compass when his salary bla bla bla...
  by johnbarron
• 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.

  by Aerroon
• 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.

  by john_strinlai
• If an AI can invent something then it should be considered obvious.
  by pfdietz
• 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.

  by Frost1x
• 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?
  by sebastianconcpt
• 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.
  by cmiles8
• Your ai slop is effectively something you own, because you wrote the prompt.
  by ReptileMan
• > 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?

  by natebc
• It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.
  by LoganDark
• 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.
  by Robotbeat
• 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.

  by grim_io
• Obvs
  by urig
• > 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."

  by graemep
• > 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.

  by thewebguyd
• 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.

  by nekusar
• I see it like a calculator, would u list a calculator as an inventor?
  by aeagentic
• As much as your question may seem like reductio ad absurdum, it highlights the question of whether an automaton is capable of inventing and what it means to invent, just like the question of whether AI is actually "intelligent" and what AGI even means.

  My opinion is that living beings like humans can invent; anything else (from simple calculator to sophisticated AI) is merely a tool that living beings can employ in their quest to invent.

  by kmoser
• 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.
  by woah
• Well who invented it then? User of said AI or owner of said AI or no one?
  by threethirtytwo
• Maybe GitHub should also say ai can’t be listed as author of pr
  by qsxfthnkp2322
• This is fixable by simply replacing the AI with a human I dont think the laws catch or can determine the differences
  by zuzululu
• So ppl will do the same thing engineers in my country do.

  They dont add into it was done by AI.

  Works like a charm and Goverment has no issues with it.

  by pojzon
• Wouldn't that just immediately get it thrown out as non-cleanroom invention considering the source of the weights is extremely public-domain heavy?
  by ikidd