A team of academic researchers have designed an artificial intelligence system called DABUS that they claim has been used AI to design the two products:
- A new type of beverage container based on fractal geometry. DABUS has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp
- A device for attracting enhanced attention that may help with search and rescue operations. This is a system of warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore.
DABUS (device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience) is a machine learning system. The academics says DABUS system should be recognized as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf. The scientists believe that Dabus AI deserves legal credit as the inventor of the fractal-based easier-to-grasp food container that it designed, as well as a lamp that it built to flicker in a pattern that mirrors brain activity. Then, legal rights over the creation should go to whomever actually built the algorithm in question.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
There is some precedent for Non-humans trying for copyrights. There was a famous case of a photogenic macaque (monkey) that snapped a photo of itself on a wildlife photographer’s unguarded camera.
PETA filed a federal lawsuit to give the monkey the copyright for his viral selfies, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in US ruled that animals cannot hold a copyright under current law. The U.S. Copyright Office went ahead and specifically listed “a photograph taken by a monkey” as an example of an item that cannot be copyrighted. If monkeys and other animals can’t own copyrights, can artificial intelligence create protected intellectual property?
This move by the academics raises a lot of legal and ethical questions.
- Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans – to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognized.
- Law professor Ryan Abbott told BBC News: “These days, you commonly have AIs writing books and taking pictures – but if you don’t have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US.
- Media’s attention toward this move resonates with last year’s prediction by Baker McKenzie that “Patentability of AI-created inventions, liability for infringement by AI, and patent subject-matter eligibility of AI technologies are the top three areas of patent law that will be disrupted by AI.”