IPPro Issue 002

Artificial Intelligence
The US must embrace the AI revolution, or its global lead in intellectual
property will be lost in time, like tears in rain
The primary source of global intellectual
property internet news and analysis
Barney Dixon reports
Schuster explains that ‘to invent’ means to “identify a certain and
permanent conception of the invention as it will be used”.
Artificial intelligence (AI) sounds cool. When you look at the breadth
of fiction attached to the technology, you might consider it the
impossible—the fantasies of authors and writers around the globe. It
is this air that gives it its identity and its mystique. But AI is very much
here, and with that, comes a particularly unique set of problems.
As Russian president Vladimir Putin once said, “the nation that leads
in AI will be the ruler of the world”. Leading in something means
leading in its every single aspect, including, in this case, setting
standards regarding AI and patent law.
For the US, a country that is currently in the midst of a potential
patent downturn, due to what some critics have called a “weakened
IP system”, headlining in AI patent policy could be important to the
continued premiership of the US patent system.
“Providing information about the existing state of the art is not—
standing alone—invention. Neither is simply identifying a goal to be
achieved or employing another to achieve that goal,” he says.
He adds: “This leads to the legal conclusion that, where a human
solely identifies a goal and provides background information for AI to
use in creating a new technology, it is the computer—not the human—
who is the inventor.”
An upcoming paper from Schuster specifically discusses this problem
and the variety of types of AI capable of invention. For example,
Schuster describes genetic algorithms as one such variant.
He details algorithms that develop “new technologies by mimicking
biological evolution”.
Implementing AI poses an unusual set of issues for a national patent
system, and not all are related to the actual patenting of AI itself. For
example, if an AI were to invent something, does the patent belong to
the AI itself, or the creator of the AI?
Assistant professor Mike Schuster, of the Oklahoma State University,
believes that these issues need to be addressed—one way or another—
in the near future. He hopes that, when the time comes, sufficient
information and research will be available to make an informed decision.
Schuster says that invention by artificial intelligence is already here.
He explains: “It has independently invented jet engines, parts of
bullet trains, communication systems, and new pharmaceuticals.”
These issues of invention and ownership are already out there, according
to Schuster, who recounts that there are already reports of an individual
who secured a patent on technology that he admits was invented by AI.
“He did so without bringing the AI’s role as inventor to the US Patent
Office’s attention,” Schuster says.
28 IPPro The Internet
“The AI creates multiple sets of random design parameters relevant to
a subject technology,” Schuster illustrates, “it then tests each set for
performance and discards poor performers.”
“The survivors then create additional parameter sets by
combining subsets of their elements to form hybrids (offspring).
These sets are ‘mutated’ by randomly altering one or more
parameters. The process repeats itself, beginning by testing the
parameter sets for performance, until an acceptably performing
design is reached.”
You’ve done a man’s job
Inventions developed by AI already exist and already, as Schuster
explains, we have seen individuals claiming ownership for AI
created inventions.
So, in this new, strange territory, how should governments react?
Should patents be owned by the AI itself? The purchaser of the AI?
Or those that developed the AI in the first place?
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