AI – A Rushing Snowball: Can AI-made Inventions Be Patented?

AI - a rushing snowball

Human intelligence has developed over thousands of years. Meanwhile, AI, including deep learning algorithms, is the result of just a few decades of work and development. There is no doubt that this snowball cannot be stopped. Artificial intelligence already has a huge impact on key areas of the economy. It also raises a number of critical legal issues, including those relating to innovation and creativity, faced by states, regulators and competent authorities across the globe. One of the most current legal challenges in this field is the admissibility and conditions for patenting inventions made by or with the use of artificial intelligence algorithms.

What exactly is AI?

To better understand this issue, it is worth bearing in mind that in the legal, technological and economic space there are different definitions and ways of understanding the concept of AI. A fresh approach to defining AI (or - rather - AI system) was presented this year by the European Commission in its proposal for the Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation) of April 21, 2021. According to this document an AI system means software that is developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches and can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with. Under the proposed law – such techniques and approaches are to include not only machine learning but also logic- and knowledge-based and statistical approaches as well as Bayesian estimation and search and optimization methods. However, the proposed EU Artificial Intelligence Act deals with other issues - and the unified definition of AI system proposed in it may also have an impact on the assessment of who is the actual author (or co-author) of the invention being filed for patenting.

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