Autonomous inventions are fake.

Market effects and relevance of these topics in the current system The main problem in the inventorship debate is that automation is confused with autonomy, leading to both terms being used as synonyms when, from a technical point of view, they are not.61 While ‘automation’ is a technical term that describes the use of technology to minimize or replace human intervention in a specific process,62 ‘autonomy’ is the capacity of an entity to make independent decisions or to govern itself without an external command.63 When AI is employed in the inventive process, it enables a more automated operation, but the conception of the ‘invention’ still belongs to the human being.64 A different question is that of determining the human inventor of ‘AI-assisted inventions’, since they require the involvement of many people, such as the programmer, those who develop the operational logic model, the machine instructors and the operators. Inasmuch as the contributions of the aforementioned actors differ according to the application of the specific AI technology, the co-inventorship between them should be determined on a case-by-case basis.65 Since AI remains an instrument without real autonomy, AI-assisted inventions should be handled like inventions assisted by any other problem-solving tools for the purpose of identifying the inventor.66 On the other hand, inventions generated autonomously by AI do not exist and will not likely emerge in near the future. Consequently, it may be precocious to review the existing patent law on inventorship at this stage.67 The AI technology that is being used in creative and inventive processes is still in development. Therefore, it is advisable to first allow this technology to evolve, understand how it works and its applications, and only thereafter to adopt regulations that are well adapted to the circumstances.68 The inventorship debate is of significant academic interest, and will certainly need to be addressed from the perspectives of many fields when AGI becomes a reality, but for the moment, it is time to ‘go beyond the exclusive focus on AI-generated outputs’.69