Prefer industry standards—AI inventions are baked in and can’t operate without humans.

The answer to the question raised in the title of this contribution, whether Al will change some patent law paradigms, seemingly depends entirely on whose position one follows. On the one hand, the main patent offices seem confident they can adequately handle Al core inventions, as well as AI-applied inventions, 215 based on the existing legal instruments. Moreover, the patent offices, without exception, accept only a natural person as an inventor, and a natural or legal person as a patent owner, without explicitly addressing the issue of inventions autonomously generated by Al. Patent authorities see no necessity to alter current standards determining either the prior art, the person skilled in the art (of ordinary skill), or those of the enabling disclosure requirement. Although they acknowledge that AI-generated data may/will increase the amount of data forming prior art to search and consider when assessing novelty and inventive step, they seemingly assume that the use of pertinent Al tools will become, in appropriate cases, an inherent characteristic of the person skilled in the art. 216 The results of the USPTO 2019 Request for Comments show that the majority of public commenters, among them many industry-leading players in Al, favourably assess the practice of the USPTO in the Al area. According to them, the current state of the art is limited to 'narrow' Al, and AGI has not yet arrived. They argue that the Al currently could not invent without human intervention and "that human beings remain integral to the operation of Al". Finally, that the existing U.S. IP laws are calibrated correctly to address the evolution of Al, 2 17 in other words, the patent granting authorities and the majority of the main users of the patent system in the field of Al, at least for the time being and for the foreseeable future do not see Al radically changing the patent law paradigms. They view the system as flexible enough to adapt to changes the Al developments generate in an evolutionary way. Available patent statistics seem to confirm these findings.218 Very similar results have been produced by an extensive Report commissioned by the EU Commission, accomplished in September 2020,219 aimed at examining the state of copyright and patent protection in Europe for AI-assisted outputs in genera2 2 0 and in three priority domains: Science (in particular meteorology), media (journalism) and pharmaceutical research, as regards the EPC and the EPO practice. The Report reached, inter alia, the following conclusions: The EPC is currently suitable to address the challenges posed by Al technologies in the context of Al-assisted inventions or outputs. - While the increasing use of Al systems for inventive purposes does not require material changes to the core concepts of patent law, the emergence of Al may have practical consequences for national Intellectual Property Offices (IPOs) and the EPO. Also, certain rules may in specific cases be difficult to apply to AI-assisted outputs and, where that is the case, it may be justified to make minor adjustments."2