I read an article recently about how AI can break the patents-related laws(I will not give the URL but you can probably find it by searching the mentioned keywords) and I was as expected disappointed.

The article was a strong push that countries should regulate and create laws to cover this void and to grant patents for AI-generated stuff too because otherwise, no one will invest in the AI sector.

First of all, I think these kinds of articles that praise patents are just paid boost of certain narratives(also known as propaganda). IMO patents are a rich men’s game.

Why I am saying that? Because the story is that they somehow protect the inventors but in reality, they only protect monopolies from the competition.

If it was about the individual being protected, then you couldn’t sell them(non-transferable rights), which is not the case.

Dismantling patents would only help the general population since it will increase competition if there’s no patent protection. There were some countries that flirted a bit with this idea example: China / Russia (Russia which recently decreed that outside software licensing is null). But in the case of Russia is just a necessity and is not outright abolition of this practice.

One best-case example of why patents are purely unethical is with the Covid vaccine when in the name of profits the existence of patents was imposed which is probably the cause of why millions of people are now dead.

Let’s be honest the abolition of patents will drastically reduce consumer prices, and why would any simple citizen be against that?

The idea of making an invention that will better humanity and then putting a price tag on it is simply a barbaric practice that should be an upheld narrative.

But now with the advent of ideas like patenting AI-generated stuff, this is completely beyond crazy because if you think about it the whole “justification” of patents is to protect “intellectual property”(which sounds like BS as objectifying intellectuality to the notion of property is very demeaning to the concept of human intelligence, ideas like humans should only be cherished and not sellable)

So returning to AI, the question is where is the “intellectual property” when content is spewed from a GAN where there’s a lot of potential stuff that you can’t even fully control.

Potentially many ML models can collide and provide similar results, especially if you’ll have similarities in the dataset, what do you do in this case? You’ll accuse one AI Model of plagiarism or “intellectual” theft?

A better step forward is not to ask ourselves what should commodify next in the interest of a few people enjoying more power than they already have but what to decommodify so more people enjoy a better life.

Later edit:

I wrote this article a couple of weeks ago but I didn’t publish it, so in meantime, the US courts already ruled that an AI can create patented/copyrighted content, so, unfortunately, as expected another victory for profits over any kind of public utility.