If an invention was trivial enough to be invented by AI then why should we allow that action to be patented? The expenditure of labor to research that invention was minimal and definitionally not novel.
If an invention was trivial enough to be invented by AI then why should we allow that action to be patented? The expenditure of labor to research that invention was minimal and definitionally not novel.
I wasn’t arguing for AI inventions to be patentable, I was arguing against the argument presented above, which to me doesn’t make sense as an argument.
I’m very much for not allowing trivial patents, but that’s independent from whether the invention was made by AI or by a human. The nature of the inventor should be immaterial for assessing the (non-)triviality of an invention.
I am in agreement that we should disallow trivial patents in general but I think there's an easy win here that patents directly attributed to AI can be clearly disregarded as trivial. It'd also be nice to see an overhaul of the patent system to better narrow the scope to investments with real innovative effort but I think that overhaul is relatively complex to implement.
> patents directly attributed to AI can be clearly disregarded as trivial.
You’d have to provide a convincing argument why that would be the case. You probably think it’s obvious, but it’s not at all obvious to me, and even assuming for the sake of discussion that it is true today, it might stop being true next year.
If we want to attribute non-humans inventor status at all (otherwise the discussion about AI is moot anyway), the assessment should be based on the merits of the invention, not on the nature of the inventor.
"AI output is patentable but it's not copyrightable" is going to be tons of fun.