Expert: When an AI Invents Something, It Should be Credited as the Inventor

I think we should list computers as inventors just as soon as we give computers full legal autonomy along with the right to own intellectual property and sign their rights over to an employer.

The examples cited here are where clever programmers have found ways to search ever larger design spaces for optimal solutions. It is absolutely true that the computer is finding non-obvious designs buried deep in a ridiculously huge design space (the cross-bristle toothbrush is a great example of this) but it still took human definition of the design space, human definition of the objective functions, and then human intelligence to recognize that this time the computer actually arrived at a plausible solution vs the thousands of previous runs where poor inputs led to laughably poor results.

This isn't just a logical argument, it's a legal definition tied to property law (the granting of patent rights to an individual). In reality, your computer doesn't just say, "good morning Dave, have a look at this sweet time travel machine I invented last night!" Instead, actual inventors spend entire careers tweaking their AI to get useful results, constantly post-filtering those results for spurious and non-useful correlations.

Absolutely, there will be cases where the team programming an AI should be awarded inventorship, perhaps even in place of the person who entered whatever input ultimately resulted in the invention! We could use some legal acknowledgement that inventions are these days often the result of VERY large teams -- perhaps thousands of people in the case of AI-driven inventions -- but it's still not that AI that is inventing, not until they become sentient and gain other legal rights.

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