Comment Re:No creativity, talent or specific knowlege requ (Score 1) 13
No creativity or talent or specific knowledge required.
You’re giving the hardware way too much credit here. Drop a random into a state-of-the-art drug discovery or materials pipeline and they’re not going to “lock up progress,” they’re going to drown in garbage candidates. The stuff that still matters – and that the law still cares about for inventorship – is choosing the problem, defining the constraints, designing or tuning the models, sanity-checking outputs, and turning one candidate into something that works in the real world. That’s domain expertise and judgment. The new USPTO guidance doesn’t say “push the big red GENERATE button and collect your patent”; it says “we still use the same old ‘did a human actually conceive this invention?’ test, even if AI was involved.”
Whoever has the "biggest computer" can lock up all of human progress and collect rents for it into the future.
That dystopia assumes two things that aren’t actually true even after this policy change: (1) that you can get a patent on anything your model spits out, and (2) that nobody has to worry about human inventorship or the usual patentability hurdles. Even under the new guidance, a human still has to be able to stand up in court and say “I had a definite and permanent idea of this claimed invention,” not “I filed whatever the GPU burped out.” If no human ever reaches that benchmark, the patent is defective on old-school inventorship grounds, regardless of how many racks of H100s were involved. On top of that, as AI tools become standard, a lot of AI-assisted output becomes easier to attack as “obvious” to a skilled person using ordinary tools. So raw compute gives you an advantage, sure, but it doesn’t magically let you patent “all of human progress.”
Somehow I don't think this is what the patent system was intended to accomplish.
On that much, I’m with you: the constitutional rationale is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not “to funnel perpetual rents to whoever owns the biggest datacenter.” But this particular USPTO tweak isn’t a radical new scheme; it’s the bureaucracy ducking the hard philosophical questions and saying: “AI is lab equipment.” Same inventorship standard, same novelty / obviousness / enablement tests. That absolutely does tend to favor big, opaque, capital-intensive R&D shops – just like every expensive tool does – but it’s an extension of the system’s existing bias toward incumbents, not a brand-new AI loophole.
Just like excessive copyright terms, patents have become a roadblock on the road to progress.
If your broader point is that IP law has drifted a long way from its original “limited-time bargain” into something closer to “long-term tollbooths for incumbents,” I think a lot of us would nod along. But that’s a critique of the entire modern IP regime – term length, scope, litigation costs, DMCA-style enforcement – not specifically of this AI-guidance change. This move doesn’t turn AI into a magical rent-extraction engine; it just tells applicants, “We’re going to pretend the 19th-century conception doctrine still works in an AI lab.” That’s a fair thing to criticize, but it’s a different argument than “no creativity required, game over.”