This is not surprising, the Federal Court of Australia issued a similar ruling last year for the same reason, namely that an inventor for the purposes of patent law must be a natural person and AI are not legal persons: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2a9508a2-d7fa...

Also worth noting that that case involved the same plaintiff as this one, Dr Stephen Thaler, who has been on a mission to have a court recognise his AI system, DABUS, as capable of inventing patents.

The courts don't come to decisions like this, but it's pretty straightforward to want to prevent AIs from being able to invent patents (even as an aid) because the obvious consequence of allowing it is companies automating the generation of patents as much as possible and flooding the patent system.

Anyone who's worked on spam prevention knows that as long as the profit is higher than the cost of impersonating a human, spammers will continue to hammer you until you can make the costs high enough to be no longer profitable.

I find it hard to believe an AI invented something without human steering. If there was any human steering, prompting, hints etc., then would I think (as a layman) that the person invented it with AI assistance.

If I understood correctly. Ruling doesn't concern with who is the actual "inventor", just that the ownership must be with a person or Corporation. So, you are free to file patents under your name that have been created by your AI. Which makes sense as AI isn't legally an autonomous entity.

Just file the patent as your own self?

Possibly controversial opinion, but this'll have to be revisited within 10 years. It seems inevitable (to me) that the near future looks like a heterogeneous mixture of natural and artificial intelligences interacting on a level footing, enforced by legal protections.

LLMs as an interface subcomponent of a larger system are surely already being prototyped, and it's a matter of time before agency emerges. In any case, most of our systems, and definitely how we manage intellectual property, are basically obsolete and require wholesale revisitation, so this is our institutions still protecting status quo until forced.

This is good. Like most of the protections in patent/copyright law, this would have protected large corporations with extensive AI resources, or trolls, and crush the little guy.

A metal detector, might detect treasure, where a human would not without its aid. But the Human is the one that get all the credit of discovery, because a metal detector is just a tool.

Given how easy it would be to turn in an AI generated patent claiming that you were the inventor I think this is some legal activism and the guy doesn't actually care about these patents.

I can't tell the goal, but is likely about clarifying the legal framework or even influence it by creating precedents in these clear scenarios.

If the A.I can not be rewarded the patent, can it therefore also not be guilty of infringement ?

Link to decision: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uksc/2023/49

Good, AI is analogous to a point and shoot camera. Define your scene via a prompt, then push a button.

(Deleted, I misunderstood the article.)

Dude should have just said he invented it…

I imagine that’s what will happen from now on

Outstanding. Cant wait for a day when code written by companies that use procedural generators and it simply becomes public domain because it cant be copyrighted.