[Public Voices] Artificial Intelligence: Invention for Humans, Creation for Humans

Artificial intelligence (AI), which becomes smarter day by day by learning vast big data, is no longer a simple tool but has emerged as an agent that invents and creates on behalf of humans. Therefore, the controversy over whether AI's creations should be recognized as intellectual property is also intensifying.

Two inventions by AI ‘DABUS’, a food and beverage container designed with a fractal structure and a lamp device and method that attract attention well, have been filed with patent offices in various countries since 2019. The inventor of DABUS is Dr. Stephen Thaler, and his legal representative is Ryan Abbott, a professor at Surrey University.

‘Coolita’, developed at Yale University in 2015, learned Bach’s chorale works. One hundred students who listened to the pieces composed by Coolita did not realize that they were works of a machine. In 2016, Sony Computer Science Laboratories’ ‘Flow Machines’ composed ‘Daddy’s Car’, a song unmistakably in the style of The Beatles, having learned The Beatles’ songs.

In the same year, Luxembourg’s Aiva Technologies developed ‘Aiva’ using deep neural networks. Aiva was registered as a composer with the French music copyright association. In December 2017, at NVIDIA’s AI conference, 15 performers were invited to play classical pieces composed with John Williams’ Star Wars theme, and the composer was Aiva equipped with NVIDIA’s Titan V graphics card.

Text-to-image AI that draws pictures by inputting the content of the image in natural language is also emerging one after another. OpenAI’s ‘DALL·E’ is representative. The June issue cover of Cosmopolitan this year was adorned with a picture drawn by AI DALL·E 2 in just 20 seconds. It is a high-quality digital art depicting a strong female astronaut walking on the surface of Mars.

Regarding the patent applications invented by DABUS, patent offices and courts in the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Kingdom maintain the position that only natural persons qualify as inventors. In July last year, the Australian Federal Court first instance recognized that AI could be an inventor. However, the Australian Federal Court reversed its position in the appeal, stating that only humans can be inventors.

The 1988 UK Copyright Act defines the author of a ‘computer-generated’ work as the person who made the necessary arrangements for the creation. It is questionable whether the contribution of inputting text to DALL·E qualifies as such ‘arrangement’. South Korea’s Copyright Act also explicitly defines works as creations expressing human thoughts or emotions, so it would be difficult to recognize copyright for purely AI-created works.

Currently, active discussions on AI inventions and creations at WIPO, governments, and academia are not simply due to a sense of crisis that AI will replace humans. Their emergence is shaking the fundamental legal principles of intellectual property, namely that only humans can invent, inventors hold patent rights, only humans can create works, and creators hold copyrights, which are the foundations of patent and copyright law systems.

Ultimately, based on the premise that intellectual property is a means for humans, efforts to reorganize the legal system are inevitable. In the long term, it may be a way to reorganize the existing intellectual property legal system, which started from the premise of ‘invention and creation by humans’, around the perspective of ‘invention and creation for humans’.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.