PATENT/COPYWRITE AI DEBACLE
Collaborate with AI to make an invention → you get the patent.
Collaborate with AI to make art → you're laughed out of the copyright office.
Same AI. Similar human involvement.
Opposite verdicts.
U.S. Patents are granted when AI helped with both conceiving the idea and expressing it in working form.
U.S. Copyrights are denied when AI helped with both conceiving the idea and expressing it in working form.
The Patent Office has the power to deny on this ground too, although I can not find any public record of it doing so against a human applicant in an AI-assisted or AI-owned case.
The Copyright Office denied Jason Allen on his AI work that won the 2022 Colorado State Fair art prize. No copyright.
Here is the current legal state of AI-assisted creation:
Patent Office: Human gets rights? ✅ AI gets rights? ❌
Copyright Office: Human gets rights? ❌ AI gets rights? ❌
Anyone who collaborates with AI on the core of a work currently cannot copyright that work.
Which is absolutely ridiculous, considering the huge numbers of people realizing they can far exceed their quality of workmanship by collaborating with AI.
The Dilemma:
The Copyright Office's position states that AI authorship disqualifies the human's claim, but at the same time, AI cannot be assigned any authorship rights itself.
Either AI can author work, or it cannot.
Pick one.