In April 2020, the South African Patent Office granted a patent for an artificial intelligence (AI) program called DABUS, an acronym for ‘Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentence’, for a novel use of fractal geometry. was used. With an improved design for food containers that improves both grip and heat transfer. Professor Adrian Hilton, director of the Institute for People-Centered AI at the University of Surrey, saw the decision as “a sign of change from an era in which invention was preserved for people to an era where machines are capable of feeling inventive.” Kadam, to unleash the potential of AI-generated inventions for the benefit of the society.”
As exciting as all this may sound, this decision appears to be more of a deviation from the rule. The DABUS application was rejected by patent offices in the US, Europe and the UK before it was eventually granted a patent in South Africa. The European Patent Office (EPO) justified its decision to reject the patent application, saying that the law designates a natural person as the inventor of a work in order to preserve his moral right to the invention as well as to be safe for him. Economic rights provided by patent. To be entitled to these benefits, an inventor needs to actually “perform a creative act of invention.”
While artificial intelligence algorithms today are capable of performing complex computational tasks that are often beyond the capability of humans, EPO pointed out that in all of these instances, programs are doing little more than following the broad instructions of the humans who designed them. did. . Even though they can mimic what makes sense for intelligence using the clever tricks of pattern recognition and complex sentence completion, they still lack “an autonomous will, self-awareness, and personality the way humans have them.” The legal norms regulating the designation of an inventor when they apply to human economic processes and society, will only serve the meaningful function they were designed to perform.
Artificial intelligence, at least in its current state of development, is well short of that mark.
Even if a computer is designated as an inventor, it is unclear what purpose it would serve. Patent holders are given a limited monopoly on their invention to monetize their work – by licensing it for valuable consideration and exercising the right to prosecute those who copy their inventions. To be able to make use of the benefits provided by this legal monopoly, an inventor must have the ability to negotiate the complex commercial terms of a patent license. In case of patent infringement, the inventor must be able to understand the nature of the infringement as well as the various pros and cons of prosecuting the infringer.
Human inventors have little trouble understanding relevant issues, and with a little guidance from patent attorneys, are able to make appropriate decisions based on their own particular social and economic context. Artificial intelligence algorithms, on the other hand, would make it difficult, if not impossible, to place all relevant data points in an appropriate context, let alone make the kind of decisions that an inventor is expected to make. Any patent granted to an artificial intelligence algorithm shall, for all practical purposes, be exercised by the inventor of that algorithm, who shall be the person negotiating the relevant licensing arrangements and infringement lawsuits on behalf of the designated inventor. In which case, what is the point of calling an algorithm an inventor in the first place?
We anthropomorphize our AI assistants by giving them names and well-modified human voices. We design them to interact with us by equipping them with canned answers to a wide range of questions. We train them to imitate our behavior, with each iteration of our software aiming to make them more believable so that they can be more closely explained in our lives. It’s hard not to get caught up in this fantasy, believing ‘lies’ to such an extent that we try and associate them with personalities, as Dubai did when it granted citizenship to robots.
The more we humanize machine intelligence, the more we need to remember how fundamentally different they are from us. All of these algorithms are little more than prediction machines designed to take the information we have and use it to find information we don’t. As magical as their predictions may seem, their abilities are constrained to produce results within the narrow domains in which they are trained. Unless they can reason, sympathize and postulate, they will never be our equal.
Late last year, the Indian Copyright Office filed a copyright on an artwork in the name of an artificial intelligence application called Raghav (robust artificially intelligent graphics and art visualizer), an acronym coined by its inventor Raghav Gupta. . In an interview on the subject, Raghav (human, not software) said that the Indian Copyright Office’s decision was “the beginning of an era of change that governments around the world would be working on.” But not until artificial intelligence was elevated. As for the position of the copyright holder being able to speak for itself, I am not going to attach any undue importance to such declarations.
Rahul Mathan is a participant in Trilegal and also a podcast called Ex Machina. His twitter handle @matthan . Is
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