Comment by howunfortunate
10 hours ago
Intellectual property laws never totally made sense to me in the first place, but they make even less sense in the age of AI.
Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?
I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.
Intellectual property laws - like most laws - favor those with a lot of money and that's why you see this asymmetry between say artists, consumers and labels/record companies. The latter simply have far more money and besides they get to optimize their efforts because they are essentially immortal.
AI and AI companies have a similar pathway open to them where they will take a lot of information already out there and then gatekeep the synthesis based on that information (obtained without compensation in most cases) as well as to harvest all of the latent knowledge underneath. This is a bad development in my opinion but I'm sure that their shareholders believe it is great.
This. Maybe AI will help make it clear that strong IP law was never about the starving musician or the heroic author who wrote his award winning novel under candle light. It is about mega property pools that will do anything in their power to maintain that property forever.
It may have started like that though, but it definitely isn't how it is used today.
That is simply not true and just the opinion of people who know nothing about artists.
The same misinformation exists about music agencies, who organize concerts and take a hefty fee.
But those were welcomed by musicians. In the early days (18th century), musicians had to do advertising themselves when traveling to a new city. The innovation was to have an impresario (literally someone who travels ahead of them) to do the organizing.
What musicians don't want is Internet middlemen who pretend to act in their interests and take an even higher cut.
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Patent laws are a way to avoid trade secrets.
You get protection from the state for making the actual knowledge public but only you are allowed to monetize that knowledge for a period of time.
Arguably the period is far too long, but the concept makes sense.
The alternative is, indeed, trade secrets, where you don’t get state protection if your secret is figured out by someone else (you still cannot steal the secret).
If the AI companies were to hoard knowledge they could also do it though trade secrets and not patents.
The purpose of intellectual property is to give an incentive to produce new knowledge (and art) by giving the inventor a way to monetize their work. Arguably this does not particularly work; but if you accept the argument then it seems to generalize fairly cleanly to AI. It's giving people an incentive to point their AIs at problems they're familiar with, and do the work to publish a solution for everyone, not just a hacked-up fix for themselves.
If certain inventions become very easy for AI models to discover, i.e. the discovery bound to happen, then in these areas it becomes a game of land grab.
True, but that is plausibly covered by existing precedent: If a discovery is "obvious to one skilled in the art", it can't be patented. IANAL but this seems to me easily extensible to "if you can do it in two five-minute prompts you can't patent it".
Separately, land grabs are not necessarily economically bad. The land being grabbed gets into productive use fast, and the grabber is hardly going to get all the resulting value. Especially not when the monopoly is temporary, as with a patent.
It's already been decided that generated content is not copyrightable
Yes, but the discussion was about patents.
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See also: Monkey selfie copyright dispute
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694
> If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?
That depends.
To what degree was your input decisive?
Did you come up with the genetic algorithm?
Is your patent written in a way that it tries to stop others from generating antennas using genetic algorithms?
How would you even write a patent like that?
(The validity of the concept of patents is a separate question, of course.)