I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.
Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.
The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.
To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].
The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.
That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.
They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.
> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.
It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.
> If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests.
As a counterpoint, I was once a physics grad student. I didn't finish the PhD because at some point I discovered that I was not going to be the next Richard Feynman and this was too much for my ego at the time. But I think that if LLMs were available, I might have finished.
Part of my problem was that at some point the math transitioned from stuff I understood to symbols and notation that I knew how to manipulate but didn't really understand. LLMs could have helped bridge that gap.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine I wouldn't have used it for Jackson, etc. but we got Jackson solutions from previous students and the internet anyway. Using LLMs probably would have been more effective, used correctly.
> The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power.
It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.
There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.
That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. There are many reasons to suspect that the goal here is not just control of funding, but the defenestration of science more broadly because scientific findings tend to conflict with assertions politicians would like to make. I would submit that people flying on planes, using cell phones and computers, and going to the doctor don't want that, even if they think they do.
Unfortunately, these are agency rules. Congress can intervene, but only with major legislative action, which is unlikely. There will be hearings and Senators will express great concern, but the Administration will probably be able to do whatever they want. If anything slows this down, it will be the courts.
> Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.
100% agree. The two examples are garden-variety computer problems and not articulated with any degree of precision for someone who claims to have attempted to troubleshoot them. It's either AI-generated or the author has only elementary Linux know-how (which is cool, but we don't need to take their wholesale dismissal of an entire ecosystem quite as seriously).
i follow AI adoption pretty closely, and i have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap.
people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.
people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams, if they're using AI at all.
it's possible the early adopter bubble i'm in has always been this intense, but there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one. not ideal!
My point still stands. The country will obviously not be permanently swarming with ICE agents violently grabbing immigrants off the street. There is going to be mission creep. If this isn't obvious then I don't know what to else I can say to convince you. Immigration is clearly just a pretext to establishing a national police force.
Remember this thread when you hear for the first time that ICE agents are tasked with doing something that has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Coming soon.
Along the same lines, anyone who thinks this is just about immigration should ask themselves what all these tens of thousands of ICE agents are going to do when all the immigrants are finally deported.
Are they just going to go home and go back to their old jobs? Or do you think the Administration is going to find something else for them to do.