It is structurally incapable of inventing

One might ask: are there immediate ramifications to technological growth if AI cannot be named as an inventor? Unlikely.

AI is Still a Tool

Although AI has become more and more advanced over the years, AI is still far away from inventing meaningful technological improvements and itself driving innovation. AI today is incredibly good at performing tasks, computing and parsing data, finding patterns, determining trends, and identifying solutions. All these tasks, however, are based on training the AI on previous examples, datasets, and patterns to solve for like outcomes. This is true across various AI industries. Cars are capable of driving autonomously because the AI component of these cars has been trained on data recorded over millions of driven miles. By the same token, AI can use natural language processing to summarize text, translate documents, and even chit-chat because it has been trained on millions of documents, question-answering datasets and previous conversations. AI can identify protein sequences and drug formulations, identify financial fraud, or diagnose cybersecurity attacks because AI has been trained to identify those patterns. There is even research in AI writing executable programing code from a proposed business case. Notably, all these tasks require human involvement, oftentimes significant. A human being designs the AI, trains the AI, and verifies when the AI produces a result. Due to advances in computing power and available training data, the AI can perform these tasks faster, more accurately, and better than humans.

AI today excels in performing tasks, yet it is still deficient in creative thinking, abstract and original thought, and identifying problems and undefined corresponding solutions. These deficiencies are, according to some jurisdictions, the hallmarks of inventorship. Until AI can transcend these limitations, it will remain a tool, rather than an inventor.