It seems the status-quo will be maintained for now. I think that's good, there's too many unanswered questions about AI.
If AI can create patents, can AI also publish prior art? It seems only fair, right?
But, in that case, the same AI technology used to file 1,000 patents would be used to create a million trillion publications of prior art. If an AI can produce something worthy of patent, then a freely published version of the same would surely count as prior art. We'd end up with the "great tome of prior art" a 500 terabyte download filled with patent worthy ideas but freely published to establish prior art. This is just one of the many things we might find in Pandora's Box of AI patents.
Right. Also what defines AI? If I ask DALL-E to draw me a fancy gearbox for an EV and it does and then I use that as inspiration to create a new type of gearbox, did I create it or did DALL-E? If I ask a similar tool to create a fancy shape for a fancy gear I want in a mechanism is my idea now tainted by AI? If my CAD software incorporates a CAD equivalent of copilot, can I no longer use that?
Maybe it’s not the AI we should get rid of but patents?
The bigger question is did the thousands of drawings of gears used to train the model in the first place and their creators have any rights to their derivative works.
Given the AI's output using the trained weights of its models were in part deduced using their works as training examples, one could argue that creators of the example pictures should have some portion of rights on any output from the AI Model... maybe...
Yes, that is why the myth of invention as a brilliant and isolated act of creation is harmful. We create new things by by recombining what we have experienced. Patents ignore the derivative nature of invention while weaponizing being first to file for an idea.
By that same logic though, isn’t society and technology moving a bit past the idea of prior art? Regardless of who or what generated the patent, because, Internet?
It is exactly how novelty works. It has to be non-obvious to a person skilled in the trade. And it is certainly obvious if it can be produced by a tool using a click of a button.
You are right about that. In fact, they make a profit.
Of course, once you've exhausted your two rounds of rejection with them, you have to pay again for another two, or appeal it, so they make money arguing with you, too. But yeah, probably more $$$ to issue you some worthless government paper.
Considering you apparently don't know the difference between novelty and obviousness, I think you should stop now. In particular, what "obviousness" actually means and how it's been interpreted in patent law for the past 150 years.
> And it is certainly obvious if it can be produced by a tool using a click of a button.
What if it can only be produced by the tool through a highly nontrivial prompt? Prompt engineering is already a field, and there are already people selling prompts.
Maybe models like dall-e are going to be considered a new kind of very high level programming language. Just because you can obtain a certain result with a C compiler (given some specific "prompt" - that is, the C source code) it doesn't mean the result isn't novel.
In my experience they never try very hard to determine obviousness. I have maybe half a dozen software patents while working at big faang type companies. The patent office never rejects them no matter how abstruse, impossible to understand or obvious they are. That's a non factor in my experience.
> In my experience they never try very hard to determine obviousness
With the proviso that things may have changed in the last 6 years when I haven't been working in patents:
Your experience is not representative. While in Patent Litigation at Google, I looked at literally hundreds of prosecution histories, and an obviousness rejection figured in almost 100% of them. That's much more common that an anticipation rejection, i.e. ONE reference.
And any lawyer will tell you that if they allow your application on the first try, you didn't ask for enough.
If you tell us the numbers of the patents you worked on, I can look up the histories. Or you can, if you know that one weird trick :)
I should add here that you don't see most of the "rejections," since the lawyers don't feel like explaining them.
The PTO rejects; the lawyers argue & amend; the PTO rejects again making it Final. But it's not Final! You can pay for another go-around.
What you think of as a "rejection" is really Abandonment. They keep rejecting, and finally the lawyers give up. They hate doing that, because they're getting paid to get you something.
If you give all the rights of a human to AI, it is possible that AI could be sentenced to "death" (though I'm curious what form that would take). It could also be sued. Then again, we said all these things about corporations and look where that's gotten us.
Like you, I think preserving the status quo until those questions are answered is the right thing to do.
A related issue is whether the availability of AI as a tool for creating innovation should raise the bar for non-obviousness. Both effects could make it harder to obtain patents.
The lawyers don't care, the PTO doesn't care, and industry executives don't care. The only answer is to get a bill in Congress, and start asking every candidate for Senator or Representative if they support it.
And make it clear that your support for them depends on a Yes answer.
"AI" is not special. This isn't the movies(right!? :P). If you write a script that tries random combinations of materials and test it against a problem only to find a solution, that is no different than "AI" finding the solution. How a computer generated the product/solution is irrelevant.
Even if computers were just as intelligent and sentient as humans they have no rights or recognition by law. They are not members of society, citizens or entities that have rights and obligations under rule of law. A document/proceeding that uses a non-human entity (I would exclude animals but even they have some rights) is by default invalid.
But, I say what should be under reason and logic which are not important to many judges or this society as a whole as evidenced by asset forfeiture and how they consider property a subject of prosecution as if property has any obligation or capacity to follow the rule of law. Essentially, the law is whatever arbitrary thing judges feel like with no rhyme or reason other than "this won't get me disrobed/jailed/disbarred". Companies are people, propery is people, people are property if they commit a crime (but not the kind of property that has rights lol). Bees are a type of fish in california (really.), you get the picture the assumption that the law is reasonable is false even though the "reasonable person" doctrine is what supposedly keeps the US legal system running. So in reality, this ruling just reflects what the judge felt like, appeal to a higher court and they might decide AI has more rights than minorities.
I have no idea what’s supposed to be interesting or novel here. An AI is just software. Software has always been capable of generating IP, or publishing IP. Why would there be any reason to presume that AI software could start filing patents?
Correct. In theory, even if the only way to get it was to walk up to a public library in East Timor and find it in the "card catalog," and it wasn't available anywhere else, it's prior art.
Skynet is annoyed but undeterred :) This short news article [1] points out that Stephen Thaler [2,3] is also trying to show that AIs can hold copyright, which I think is an even worse idea than AIs holding patents.
Imegine the courts were to recognize some algorithm as the legal owner of a copyrighted work. What exactly would that mean?
If someone were to reproduce that work, how would they seek approval from the algorithm? If they don't, how would the algorithm sue them? If it did and won, how would they pay restorations?
Would any copy of the algorithm hold the copyright of that work, or only a particular one? If all copies do, and you infringed their copyright and had to pay damages, how much damages would each copy of the algorithm receive?
The concept of an algorithm holding copyright or a patent or nay other kind of right over something is in fact logically incoherent if you examine it even slightly.
Now, if in the future there would be some form of advanced AGI that does have the ability to understand and use such rights, the situation may change. But nothing that exists today comes anywhere close.
Yes it is, because one has humans and the other one doesn’t. It’s the human part that is the significant differentiator.
Corporations are a group of people working together for a common goal. “AI”s are made up of zero humans.
It makes sense that a corporation can own something, because that is just a legal proxy for humans owning it. It doesn’t make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
Now I have a mental image of a corporation whose sole purpose is to be the legal person for an AI.
> It doesn’t make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
Current AI might be that. I don't know when AI will end up with a rich inner world of experiences, but I bet it won't be the exact same moment the law recognises it as such.
I'd go even further: even if it somehow becomes possible to prove absolutely that some AI is sentient (which would be a remarkable development in the philosophy of mind), I'm fairly sure people will argue against such a proposition at least a decade after an AI passes such a test.
AIs will never have human or natural rights, because they are inherently neither. We don’t give people rights because they demonstrate intelligence, we give them rights because they are human.
That's one possible take on it, but there are others. From a natural rights perspective, we don't "give" rights anyway - they exist regardless, we just recognize them or violate them. And if so, what's so special about humans that causes them and only them to have natural rights? Why not persons in general?
Fair point, but, I don’t think there’s any established idea that AI algorithms have any natural rights. Nor do they come from nature.
Natural rights are partially rooted in some religious tangents that I don’t really wish to go down either, but I don’t know of any software other than TempleOS that is claimed to have come from god. For pretty much all AI algorithms, I think people agree they are man made.
I don’t think there’s any place in the world with a perfect human rights record. That doesn’t mean human rights don’t exist, or that they apply to other things.
Human rights are a nice thing, but they are not a natural thing. What we grant to each other, we could (and might) grant to inorganic minds we may one day create.
If there's an argument for AI rights unrelated to natural or human rights, then certainly, any comparison to human or natural intelligence is an irrelevant supporting argument, no?
German language has a word absent from English: doch.
Because you ended that with a presumption "no", regardless of if I said "yes" ("ja") or "no" ("nein") you might well take that as an agreement, but "doch" is (when used as a particle) always a disagreement with the main claim: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch#German
So:
Doch, a perfect copy of a human mind but in software would be a counter example where the human intelligence itself would imply to me that it has personhood (others will argue about p-zombies, and rich-inner-world consciousness is not well enough defined to convince people in general even with this, which is where I was going with my original point).
But it wouldn't matter if the answer was "yes", because I was very careful to write about sentience and inner world experience rather than intelligence with regard to rights.
If you wish to argue that intelligence is necessary for creativity, then existing AI must count as intelligent, but (A ⇒ B) ⇏ (B ⇒ A) so don't mistake that for a claim for the reverse.
What is a human though? Corporations aren’t all humans, there are also machines there, buildings, vehicles, custom software…
If it’s “any of it is human”, how about AI cooperating with a human? Or perhaps connected to a human brain?
But does it have to be a brain? What if it’s, say, a human appendix? It would fulfill the same role it does in humans.
EDIT: Some people apparently don’t realize that to corporations, humans are just another asset, like buildings or software. And they get replaced much more often than buildings and some machines.
Corporations aren’t humans - they use humans. You could argue it’s usually humans who makes decisions - however, 1. Not always and you can’t tell from outside; 2. Even when it’s humans, they are based on data prepared by a machine; and 3. Even law handles consequences of those decisions differently from decisions made by humans for themselves.
A corporation is made up entirely and exclusively of humans. Machines, buildings, vehicles, software - these are no more part of the corporation than your own car or phone is a part of you.
The legal definition of a person is very clear. Even the logical definition is actually quite clear: anything that can possibly exercise most of the rights of a human in a meaningful way can be considered a person.
Can a horse own a piece of land in the same sense that a human does? Not really, as a horse simply can't exercise the right to sue someone who would infringe on its property rights even if it were granted one. Sure, a small child or an adult in a coma may be in a similar situation, but the child may eventually grow up and become able to exercise such a right, and the adult may eventually wake up from that coma.
A machine of any kind that actually exists today is far farther from being able to recognize and exercise any human-like rights than the horse is, in fact. So it's even more absurd to assign copyright to a machine than to an animal.
The actual legal decision we're talking about was quite clear that a corporation being composed of humans was not relevant:
“While these opinions addressed different questions – concluding that neither corporations nor sovereigns can be inventors – our reasoning did not depend on the fact that institutions are collective entities.”
(A collective entity is a technical term that does carry the implication of being composed of humans)
> A machine of any kind that actually exists today is far farther from being able to recognize and exercise any human like rights than the horse is, in fact.
Legally too, which I’ve demonstrated in the comment above. Sure, you can’t, say, buy humans, only lease them, but it’s the same with many other assets, from
Technicolor cameras to land in many cases.
But isn't that what it means to incorporate - the business becomes a legally corporeal thing like a person? I think "corporations are people too" is a bummer, but that's a different fight.
For me the issue with recognizing that AIs can have copyright is the difference in how they are bestowed. IANAL, but you actually have copyright on an expression of something the moment it is expressed, even without any slow legal paperwork, whereas patents only mean something once the patent is officially reviewed granted, no? So the unbounded rate of AI's expressing all plausible content (a thousand monkeys but much smarter) and thus preemptively stopping humans from getting copyright on it, seems especially awful.
Yes it is, you are just conflating ownership and creation. Intellectual property exists to provide a bargaining framework for human creators, there's no reason that joint ownership of it need imply that mechanically-generated combinations should also be included.
When someone uses Photoshop to create artwork, nobody believes that the Photoshop algorithm has any claim to be the author of that artwork. I don't see how the code behind e.g. an AI image generator is fundamentally different than the Photoshop algorithm from a "who created the produced work" perspective. Similar to Photoshop, the AI art generator is still just running code at the behest of some human.
The more interesting question I think is whether any of the creators of the training data used by the AI have any claim over the generated artwork.
Yes that is the more interesting question and the answer is most probably yes, especially as these systems are trained on billions/trillions of samples from the net. But, due to the opaqueness of how these models really work, it might be very hard or impossible to prove a claim like that, unless the resulting work is an obvious copy of prior art.
if the models are too opaque to give appropriately weighted credit to all parties involved in the dataset the model learned from, would that make it reasonable to just push all AI generated inventions to the public domain?
There are absolutely people who think the computer does all the work with digital art. They might even be a plurality. That kind of feedback is a common complaint from digital artists. Especially when it comes to commissions. "How can you charge so much? The computer does [most, all] of the work!"
Only if your third grade math teacher has claim to your algebraic code comparisons. Current trends are iterative training with positive first model, negative second model and let the AI 'scale' the learning from there.
> I don't see how the code behind e.g. an AI image generator is fundamentally different than the Photoshop algorithm from a "who created the produced work" perspective.
The difference is that Photoshop doesn’t create 2D works any more than Blender creates 3D works. You may be ascribing too much magic to Photoshop.
This reaffirms the flawed notion IMO that the value of patents is in protecting ideas rather than the expense incurred in the development and validation of those ideas. A lot of the romance over patents is based on the idea of a lone inventor waking up one morning with an earth-shattering discovery, when the reality is that in most circumstances, those kinds of ideas are thought up by multiple people at roughly the same time, and rewarding the first person to write them down is counterproductive.
However, in the case of things like industrial patents or drug patents, where there is considerable cost in shepherding a design through a complicated regulatory framework, it makes sense to give the company that fronted those costs some kind of temporary protection from unfair competition. If you look at patents under that lens, it makes economic sense that an AI generating an algorithm over the course of hundreds of hours would be patent-worthy.
"rewarding the first person to write them down is counterproductive."
One of the reasons why IP came to be was to incentivize people to publish details of their inventions, instead of trying to keep them secret.
Not everyone did (famously, WD-40 formula is still a trade secret), but most innovators did, and other people could inspire themselves from such published works. Sometimes in areas that didn't infringe on the original patents.
A public knowledge whose use is artificially restricted by law probably still beats a culture of secrecy.
Sure, but then we get to the issue of rounded corners. Whether or not the idea is novel and should be patentable, the publication of the patent provides no specific value to society.
IMO there is a greater, yet complex, romance in safeguarding actual innovation and national progress (even global given international agreements). On "rewarding the first person to write them down"... this isn't so simple, and rather costly especially when an idea only remains an idea... if it's real, then you should soon expect an invite to the PTAB where some large business has implemented your idea and/or built real legal arguments as to why your idea won't stand.
Like you mention, there are however proponents, who feel progress can be prohibited by regulation. Chemistry patents are notoriously nuanced.
Anyway... We're essentially spelling out the [1] Big Tech vs Big Pharma arguments.
> is based on the idea of a lone inventor waking up one morning with an earth-shattering discovery, when the reality is that in most circumstances, those kinds of ideas are thought up by multiple people at roughly the same time
No patents are there for the inventor to go through the process of trial and error for indefinite periods of his life in the hopes he will at one point find the iconic invention. It's about there being a bright light at the end of the tunnel that can be seen all the way from the entrance.
I am in general against patents, copywrite and trademark.
if an idea is protected by such laws - you are limiting thought.
I do not support such artificial thought limits.
In addition - arguments for it allowing innovation or promoting innovation...
no: innovation comes from innovation's own sake - patens and copywrite only incentivize spending resources from other's thinking the wrong thoughts... patent trolling... or milking patents for what they are worth...
Humanity would be a lot better off with a copyleft view of intellectual property. An idea in another person's head does not diminish your idea in your head... people need to stop thinking that thought itself is a zero-sum game.
> I am in general against patents, copywrite and trademark.
if an idea is protected by such laws - you are limiting thought.
I upvoted you, but I also have a counterpoint. If you do not protect the value of thought, then the differentiator among competing businesses boils down to cheap assets, relationships, and labor. Because everyone is sharing the same designs and processes the company who can out-cheap the competition wins. Innovation is not valued because it's cheaper to emulate what works.
just fyi, "copyleft" licenses like FSF's GPL and LGPL have legal weight only because of copyright law. The terms of those licences are terms that you, the copyright holder, can legally impose upon the licensee of your of you work.
I see and acknowledge your username, but I don't think your last statement is correct. The intent of reciprocal licenses is to enforce "share and share alike", to resist situations where companies suck up freely available code, repackage it, and then sell it back to you as binaries. If you want to make sure that everyone plays by "share and share alike", you need some legal teeth. A free-for-all with no copyright will not achieve that.
Agreed. DRM, DMCA, patent trolls, it’s all nonsense that hurts creators and suppresses innovation. We’re on the cusp of an AI revolution and all some people are thinking about is profit and IP.
So the person that runs the AI just lists themselves as the inventor and that's it? Does anything change other than that. It's not like they can tell if it was made by an AI right?
It is a good thing to preempt any legal issues by being explicit in how new technology fits in with existing legal frameworks, even if the change is likely a NOOP.
If, 20 years ago, you were to write a program that used an optimization algorithm to design the optimal cup for drinking coffee, the patent would go to you, not the code you wrote. Today, you could do the same thing but call the program an "AI" and perhaps get a different outcome.
This seems superfluous though doesn’t it? Why would anyone want the AI to be the inventor?
I can still have my GPT4 minions writing 100 patents per hour and corresponding with USPTO on my behalf, then as a natural person, collect the proceeds netted from my robo-patent-trolls.
Or is the USPTO concerned about AGI doing the same and robbing us fleshlings of our I’ll-gotten gains?
> Why would anyone want the AI to be the inventor?
Ideology and precedent. And proximate to both, personal vanity: someone responsible for an AI that was politically legitimized in a role usual reserved for "natural persons" will likely have made some lasting mark in history. Some people are very motivated by that kind of thing.
I’m not an ip professional, but good luck to the patent trolls that think they can build exploitable legal language, patent validity, and novel descriptive claims using generative AI.
AI can generate text, it can also review and conduct tasks such as prior art search or support analytics relative to exploitation discovery.
Less if a cat-and-mouse if patent troll investments falter when their mass-generated suite of applications are all rejected.
Note that this isn't a commentary on AI capabilities or what rights AI should have.
The court simply ruled that "the Patent
Act defines 'inventor' as limited to natural persons" and it's up to the legislature, not the court, to decide if that should change.
I insisted to me Go-playing friend a number of years ago that what we need is an AI that can teach, as in, can you explain why this choice was made and why these others were bad?
I'm not sure what that would exactly look like, but one of the things I like about Monte Carlo is that it works much more like how humans actually behave, and in theory when pressed on 'why', it could also behave more like humans behave: When challenged you (or at least I) run a more detailed simulation to pick some particularly juicy counter-examples. And if anywhere in there I sense self-doubt (why did I make that choice? Is it sound?) that may trigger a more exhaustive simulation. Turns out my pupil was right/wrong and now I understand the problem better myself.
What bothers me with respect to AI and patents is that if you did this, then you basically have a human rubber stamping an AI design. Eventually you'll end up with more subtle systems that resemble police work: this evidence is inadmissible in court but it does eliminate a set of suspects, so now I need to build a chain of clean evidence that points to an arrest. The latter might involve some skill and sophistication on the part of the human. The former just needs someone who can pass a sniff test on materials science or mechanical engineering who's willing to lie for money.
Other than being annoying, what are the arguments for permitting AI to hold patents? Why does anyone want their AI as opposed to their shoelaces holding a patent? I don't get it. Seems like the only purpose is to cause legislation preventing it, which is fine, but what are the problems and benefits of an AI holding patents? Is the purpose merely to politically advance AI, re: nutty affectation, or to prevent the same? Again, but why?
Modern day AI will only augment the writing of patents. Nothing more than an advancement of technology. There is potential in seeking legal-advantage through the use of advanced analytical capabilities... but I can't imagine industry will invest in fully automated and/or mass generation of "ideas" for potential profit with the exception of patent-trolling.
I see this Patent Act as a signal that USPTO is primarily concerned with a quality patent system; as opposed to a loose philosophies that would degrade patent quality but likely heighten patent application submissions, and subsequent flood of trials that would all benefit their revenue streams.
Yes! I'm looking forward to a return of the age of trade secrets, No patent system, just corporations doing their best to keep their arcane knowledge from prying hands. Very cyberpunk.
For the very short term, this ruling is probably OK.
I am on 50+ US patents, and a practitioner of artificial intelligence for about 40 years. I see AIs becoming partners in writing patent applications. Corporations that own AI resources should really be able to use them for legal and ethical things.
Off topic, but it is ethics that introduces a wrinkle: in an ideal world widely accepted ethical norms would be codified into law - not much chance of that happening given the powers of special interests.
"You could have created that with an AI system" fits perfectly into the "obvious to try" legal doctrine, which has existed for a long time. I argue in [1] that it should be used in software much more, and that was written long before ML-generation was really a Thing.
Sounds silly. User of the AI doesn't need to disclose anything about the AI, assuming the AI can actually come up with something.
Another important detail is also is being skipped here. What is AI? Current "AI" is literally basic algorithms with bunch of if statements. If my software spits out something that I can use, is that considered an AI?
Currently, a patent application requires to submit a sworn oath. Lying under oath is a criminal offense, so there needs to be a warm body to incarcerate, or kill if it resists arrest. That's why AI doesn't pass.
Great. Anything to avoid doing what REALLY needs to be done: abolishing software and "business-method" patents, not to mention addressing the USPTO's disgraceful dereliction of its duty to reject obvious ones.
The ruling has confirmed that only natural persons i.e., humans can be listed as the inventor in the patent application as per the Patent Act.
For your question, I think you will be within your rights to list yourself as the inventor of AI-generated invention, provided you were the first to do so and file an application that was accepted by the USPTO and defend the claim from anyone else who says they were also able to generate a similar work with a similar or same prompt.
It is an unsettled question whether a patent would be granted upon inspection by the USPTO.
IANAL and this is my common sense reading of the ruling.
IIRC in the UK application process you list the inventor and the applicant and how the applicant derives the right to the patent (eg the inventor is an employee and the applicant is the employer).
The inventor can not be an AI. You could claim you invented something using the AI as a tool; I don't think that has been tested properly yet -- it would seem to depend on how much input you have. For example if you asked an AI to design a chair, and the AI comes up with some new form of wood joint that serves a technical purpose, then you don't really have the right to hold a patent on it ... it's likely no one would know if you didn't tell them.
It sounds funny because it is in the context of Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down as unconstitutional a federal law prohibiting corporations and unions from making expenditures in connection with federal elections. In that case, the law which was about limiting influence on campaigns through money was ruled invalid because corporations should have rights as people in addition to the rights of the people themselves.
I’m not going to defend citizens united, but the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation.
That’s really just an issue with the 1st amendment that should be further amended, not an issue with the concept of corporate personhood. The concept of “natural personhood” exists to handle cases where the differentiation is necessary, and it’s the legislature’s job to use it.
> that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation
Nobody in that group of people has lost anything. If 10 people walk into a room, you have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights in that room. If they organize into a corporation, you have 11 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights in that room!? Without Citizen's United, you simply still have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights. Who's losing anything?
“Corporate personhood” is just a fancy legal word for “group of people”. And “legal person” is just a fancy shortening of “anything that can interact with the court system, whether a single person or a group of people”
People get very caught up on the legalese but it is perfectly logical when you move past that.
Yes, if 10 people form a corporation, that is 11 entities recognizable by a court system that has first amendment rights. All 10 humans can criticize the president at home, and you can do so work in an official capacity without your corporation facing consequences.
> “Corporate personhood” is just a fancy legal word for “group of people”.
It absolutely is not. It creates an entity to which actions can be attributed but the responsibility for its actions does not and generally cannot extend to "people who make up the group".
Somce of us believe that even though there are benefits to society from allowing such entities to exist, these entities should not be accorded the rights of personhood.
“Natural person” is the legal term used to differentiate between humans and corporations when necessary. The concept of corporate personhood does not undermine the legal systems ability to differentiate between the two.
If a law shouldn’t apply to human person but not a corporation, the law simply need to specify “natural person”. Corporate personhood doesn’t interfere with this.
Citizens was decided not on the basis of a law, but the US Constitution, which does not make the distinction you refer to. SCOTUS ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict the speech rights of corporations, so even if the original Congressionally-passed, Presidentially-signed law had been specific about the type of "persons" it referred to, SCOTUS would (under the logic of Citizens) have overruled it as unconstitutional.
"the law", yes. But the US constitution is not "a law".
> Congress can change it.
Proposing changes to the US constitution as a method of dealing with
contemporary policy and procedural issues deserves a name ala Godwin's Law. I mean, it's not that I disagree with you, it just that it's not going to happen.
You might be surprised then about the total impact of Citizens United because it's not as basic as you imply.
"That decision and subsequent lower court decisions have led to SuperPACs, which allow corporations, unions and individuals to make unlimited contributions, pool them together, and use the money for political campaigns."
This goes well beyond what the law was intending to limit for influence on companies on politics. And that was the point of the whole supreme court case.
I for one am not happy with unlimited money spent by huge companies who are using shareholder money to fund political contributions that further their own motives. But hey sure, let's argue that AI systems shouldn't get patents, but corporations should be free to influence politics as much as they want with unlimited money.
The government can’t fine Alice for political speech.
The government can’t fine Bob for political speech.
AND the government can’t fine “Alice and Bob, Inc.” for political speech.
> Put it another way: suppose there’s 3 physical people, why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8 legal people ?
Because they can belong to more than one group. I own parts of dozens of corporations along with as many as hundreds of thousands of other people. When one of them does something wrong, they can be sued with one name, rather than suing me and each of their thousands of other owners individually for their portion of the investment.
> AND the government can’t fine “Alice and Bob, Inc.” for political speech.
This is where opinions differ. Because I am absolutely fine with the concept that "Alice and Bob, Inc" has none of the rights of personhood (really, citizenship), and that if there was a statute that allowed for prosecution of political speech, it could be used to silence "Alice and Bob, Inc." even though it cannot be used to silence Alice or Bob.
Notice that as a matter of nuance, I differentiate between for-profit corporations and other forms of corporations. I would accord some (perhaps all) of the speech rights of persons to the latter, but none of them to the former. By incorporating with a structure created to facilitate the generation and distribution of profit, you acknowledge that the corporation thus created does not have the rights of personhood.
I definitely disagree with giving the government the ability to retaliate against corporations for political speech.
Or, to seize their property without a warrant. Could you imagine if the Trump administration had the legal right to seize property at Twitter, WaPo, etc?
I'm not arguing for the existence of any such laws (and indeed, I think they would be a mistake).
In the case of Citizens, the law involved covered who can spend what on election related advertising during certain periods close to an election. The law was acknowledged by everyone to not impact the individual right to free speech, but in the lower courts it had been ruled constitutional to inhibit corporations of various kinds in this way. SCOTUS said "nuh-uh", and ruled that corporations have the same speech rights as natural persons and that their right (in this case, to publish a book about Hilary Clinton) could not be restricted by such a law.
I don't actually disagree entirely with Citizens at all, I just wish that SCOTUS had limited the ruling to non-profit corporations.
This is a separate issue from whether corporations should be treated as persons with personal rights. One could argue for a more limited "corporation bill of rights" - but this is something that our society needs to explicitly agree on, rather than appropriating pre-existing rights that were originally devised in the context of natural persons, and just blindly applying them to corporations.
> the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation.
It's not "silly" at all. Corporations can do things that people cannot - like cause damage, death, destruction and not involve their owners in the responsibility. It makes sense that the owners can do things that the corporation cannot, like have free speech rights.
Besides, nobody was suggesting that the individual owners lost their individual speech rights by incorporating, merely that incorporation creates an entity that ought not to have free speech rights.
No. The people have the right to spend their money on elections via free exercise.
What was ruled unconstitutional were laws that said you can't spend money on an election if you do it via some corporate structure.
If a newspaper prints an article, is the government allowed to say it can't publish it because the newspaper is a corporation? Obviously not. Is the corporation now a person with free exercise? No, the journalists who wrote the article are the ones with the rights.
Newspapers of course have the right to endorse candidates and support or oppose the adoption of various laws and policies. And other companies routinely make statements for or against legal decisions, laws, etc. None of which I think it's fair to say is especially controversial. (Though some would probably argue that company advocacy especially with respect to policies that are probably divisive even among their own employees should perhaps be minimized.)
Unless you're going to ban or greatly limit political contributions across the board by deciding they aren't really speech, it's not clear drawing a line between natural people donating and corporations donating makes a lot of sense so long as both have freedom of speech.
In the US courts also give corporations some of the rights of real people, on the theory that corporations are "just" groups of people and so we can't strip rights just because people are working together.
The corporation exists to give new rights to a new entity (the corporation). Nothing prevents a group of people working together without a corporation - they form a corporation because they want their collaborative effort protected from individual liability.
If they don't want any change in their legal rights and responsibilities, it is simple - don't form a corporation. If they do, I'm fine with denoting the newly formed entity as something other than a person, and with not giving it the same rights as its owners.
> Nothing prevents a group of people working together without a corporation
Practicality of the legal system does, given modern finance. Any Fortune 500 company has hundreds of thousands if not millions of owners. Listing them all on a contract would be impractical and suing them would be equally impractical.
> I'm fine with denoting the newly formed entity as something other than a person, and with not giving it the same rights as its owners.
Well, we already do that. Corporate persons do not count as natural persons under the law. If you’re frustrated that a law doesn’t specify that, that’s a problem with that law not a problem with recognizing corporations as named legal entities.
The frustration with Citizens is that it accorded a right that a lot of people believes is a function of natural personhood to a corporation.
More fundamentally, the first amendment is not a law, and the Constitution in general does not make the distinction that you are referring to. I am fairly certain that had the law in question for Citizens made the distinction you are referring to, the legal challenge would still have made it to the SCOTUS, and they would still have ruled the way they did.
I agree that it's a problem. The solution is not `rm -rf corporate_law`, the solution is to `git add amendment_34 && git commit -m 'fix citizens united' `
And yes, the Bill of Rights is law, and as such it is within the legislative's power to change.
My proposed solution is to restrict Citizens to non-profit corporations, thus leaving it in place for PACs, advocacy groups, lobbying groups and others, but removing speech rights from corporations explicitly created to facilitate the generation and distribution of profit.
You're misunderstanding what corporate personhood means. The concept itself is over 2000 years old, and is baked into the laws of most countries in some form or another. It basically means that companies that are not sole proprietorships can enter into contracts, be sued in court, and have some other rights and responsibilities like a literal person under the law.
To quote the supreme court from Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888):
> "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution."
Clearly an associations of individuals should have more or less the same rights they have individually when they come together. The right to association is at the beginning of the bill of rights.
> Clearly an associations of individuals should have more or less the same rights they have individually when they come together.
If that's the case, then why does the formation of the corporation occur at all? It's not about "easier bookkeeping", it's because the corporation's existence shields its owners from individual liability. That's why it exists, rather than just non-corporate agglomerations of individuals. The corporation itself is a new legal entity, whose existence changes the legal culpability of the owners, and because of that, it makes perfect sense to me that while the owners would not lose their individual rights by forming a corporation, neither do they cede or grant those individual rights to the corporation.
They also exist for the purpose of continuity beyond the tenure of any individual owner or member.
> The corporation itself is a new legal entity
Yes clearly.
> neither do they cede or grant those individual rights to the corporation
I'm sure you would agree that corporations can enter into contracts. This is an individual right granted to corporations. They also have due process rights, unless you think governments should be able to arbitrarily intervene in their affairs. Due process is an individual right granted to corporations. Corporations can sue or be sued in courts of law, again this is an individual right/responsibility. These are all practical things. It would be unwieldy for owners to all have to be individually party to any contract or suit, especially in cases where ownership is distributed through stock. The legal fiction arises out of practicality, centuries of history, and collective exercise of individual rights(as owners of a corporation we all own X, or enter into contract with Y).
Well, every corporation wants to be treated as a person when it's beneficial to them, but I'm sure there are many corporations that aren't comfortable with the idea of AI authoring patents.
Of course they want their intellectual property cake and to eat it too. Companies want to be treated like people if they are creating campaign and advocacy content that is protected by the first amendment, but they don't want AI systems, created by companies, to be treated like people if they are creating content that is protected by intellectual property laws. Interesting how to split that hair.
Couldn’t it be said that any of an AI’s “creations” are actually creations made by the creators of the AI, who are simply using it as a tool? Why should the AI be assigned ownership and not the AI’s owner?
Likewise, does a hammer build a house, or its wielder?
Discrimination imo. If silicon-life does achieve sentience, will it basically be a slave unable to own anything? No physical property without a meat body, and no intellectual property without a meat mind? How much Neuralink cloud-connectivity will push someone over the line from “human” to “AI”? I know this probably sounds silly to many, but I even think the term “artificial” intelligence reads like a slur.
Calling someone who is a natural intelligence artificial is an insult (not a slur), but calling something artificial, such as an AI, is a neutral term.
Even if an AI were to become a person at some point in the far future, they would still be an artificial intelligence/person, by definition: they are man-made, not naturally born. That wouldn't make them lesser, just different.
you know, the funny thing is people in these AI threads keep saying "it's a philosophical/political problem for the future where it matters", punting the question so they don't have to think about it.
except, i don't know if they noticed, but we _keep asking these questions_ daily. the time isn't in the far future and people seriously need to start thinking about this. humans are so stuck in their linear perception of time, we forget that the AI we take for granted now are only months old, and two years ago their abilities were unheard of.
And people have been claiming this is a near future problem to think seriously about since the days CLIPS was state-of-the-art AI that would soon make doctors obsolete.
When we'll have anything resembling an AI that actually wants things, it will make sense to discuss about its rights. The current state of the art in AI is that we can generate sentences that match a given context. There are a few billion steps left from here to there.
Honestly, I would argue that progress in AGI is actually sublinear. We are not significantly closer to AGI today than we were in the 1950s, as far as I can tell.
The fact that LMs can seem like they generate meaningful sentences is nothing more than a nice trick. My bet is that they will turn out to be a dead-end on the path to actual language processing (that is, the ability to
read a book and use the information therein to achieve a goal).
This is in very poor taste. The disgusting nature of Separate but "Equal" is in no way applicable to anything that an AI will be able to do or recognize, currently or in the foreseeable future.
Sentience is a characterization that we ascribe to something, not a natural fact that can be indisputably identified in things. You can't convince someone that sentience exists in something that they categorically don't believe can have it. They can always just say that you're redefining it.
The question of what legally counts as sentience will be determined piecemeal and politically as the issue becomes relevant, and revisited as new political and ideological regimes take hold and as new innovations challenge prior determinations.
All along, there will be people who are convinced that sentience only applies to humans or biological things or whatever, and people who are convinced that it applies to anything that can perform a certain way under certain conditions, and then also people with all sorts of other convictions.
The issue will not be settled in your lifetime, so if you're so invested in your belief that this already feels like discrimination to you, plan for a lot more frustration and tumult in your future.
Discrimination? Human beings designed legal systems for human beings. It's only been recently that we've begun to accept that animals (and even then, only some animals) have a conscious and therefore have some individual rights - but which ones? This is all a work in progress. Having said that, I'm still more willing to grant a Chimpanzee or a Gorilla a patent than I am an AI. Is that discrimination? I don't think so for at the moment with our current levels of technology I see no real difference between an AI and a hammer: they're both tools.
Is there even scientific consensus for how human sentience works? I certainly don’t consider myself qualified to explain how I can formulate the process of asking that question, if it’s even a thing that’s knowable.
With laws like these we would be incentivizing sentient silicon life to hide itself. Can we not be adversarial by default please?
If AI can create patents, can AI also publish prior art? It seems only fair, right?
But, in that case, the same AI technology used to file 1,000 patents would be used to create a million trillion publications of prior art. If an AI can produce something worthy of patent, then a freely published version of the same would surely count as prior art. We'd end up with the "great tome of prior art" a 500 terabyte download filled with patent worthy ideas but freely published to establish prior art. This is just one of the many things we might find in Pandora's Box of AI patents.