Status quo solves --- inventors just won’t disclose AI inventions.
Abbott 20 – Professor of Law at the University of Surrey School of Law, Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, PhD from the University of Surrey School of Law, J.D. from the Yale University School of Law.
Ryan Abbott, “The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law,” University of Surrey, 01-24-2020,
As discussed earlier, given that AI is functioning as an inventor, and likely inventing at an increasing rate, it would seem that the Patent Office should be receiving an increasing volume of applications claiming AI as inventors. That the Patent Office apparently has not suggests that applicants are choosing not to disclose the role of AI in the inventive process. Again, this may be due to legal uncertainties about whether an AI inventor would render an invention unpatentable. Without a legal inventor, new inventions may be ineligible for patent protection and may enter the public domain after being disclosed.
There is another reason why AI inventors may not be necessary, specifically in the patent context: A person may qualify as an inventor simply by being the first individual to recognize and appreciate an existing invention. That is, to say, someone can discover rather than create an invention. Uncertainty (and accident) is often part of the inventive process. In such cases, an individual need only understand the importance of an invention to qualify as its inventor. If an AI cannot be an inventor, individuals who subsequently “discover” AI-generated inventions by mentally recognizing and appreciating their significance would likely qualify as inventors. So, it may be the case that AI-generated inventions are only patentable when an individual subsequently discovers them. However, that model does not seem appropriate when AI results are essentially self-explanatory, such that inventive activity is not needed to appreciate the inventive nature of AI output. This may be the case in which an AI evaluates its own output for value, or the AI was working to generate an invention that met predetermined criteria.