AI Revolutionizing Invention: Embracing the Ever-Evolving Realm of Innovation

One may make the case that creators, authors, and artists should have some say over who uses and profits from their work. This is typically accomplished via copyright laws. In most cases, the legal notion of “individual intellectual effort” is used by these statutes to establish authorship. In other words, the artist must have infused their work with sufficient originality and imagination to set it apart from previous works. But how can a person accomplish this? Some contend that, in contrast to AI, humans possess a unique quality that enables us to produce “new” works of art.

The IP battle between humans and AI

When it comes to intellectual property law, many jurisdictions have ruled that only “real humans” can be inventors, creators, or authors. However, when AI is involved, it’s not always apparent who is regarded as the author of a piece. Currently popular generative AI solutions take text suggestions as input and output what the user wants. Did a human put in enough labor to be deemed the author, inventor, or creator of the output work when they entered a specific set of prompts into an AI tool? In such case, where did the creative energy and originality originate from if the work is not plagiarized?

Many issues arise for those making and utilizing these technologies as a result of this line of thinking, particularly when trying to establish ownership. Generally speaking, it’s bad for the IP system as a whole. What, however, happens when an AI tool reaches the point where it is as knowledgeable as a human and has accumulated all the facts and experiences that a human could ever have? Similar to how a chess computer can anticipate every possible move a grandmaster would make, the AI would be capable of solving every difficulty that a person might think of. As a result, practically no new ideas are generated today, unless the human creator possesses exclusive, non-disclosable data.

Avoiding intellectual property problems with generative AI

You can take immediate, actionable actions to guarantee that anything created with the aid of generative AI will be credited to you as the creator, author, or inventor. The most critical thing is to keep track of when and how you employ AI technologies, as well as the data you use to obtain results. The newest generation of AI tools require you to document the prompts you use, together with the date and version of the tool, so they can be properly tracked. This might be very important later on when you need to prove that you were the rightful creator or inventor by demonstrating that enough “intellectual effort” was put into it.

It is important to ensure that you possess adequate rights to the datasets utilized for training new AI tools before beginning development. By doing so, you may rest assured that your tool’s underlying AI model will not mistakenly generate derivative works that violate the rights of others. The number of governments mandating the sharing of training datasets is expected to grow over time.