This is a misconception. It’s more fundamental than that. There’s a fundamental connection between (Shannon) information theory and thermodynamics. The Landau Limit, whether blackholes can destroy information or not, quantum mechanics, etc.
Information is actually tangible. It’s not just an analogy or a coincidence that the word “entropy” is a word used in both physics and computer science (information theory). Thermodynamics, mind you, is perhaps THE most fundamental elements of physics and how the universe works.
Engineers became really jaded by Shuttle and the failure o X-33. Many of them, inappropriately, started claiming it was impossible. You still hear people claiming things are impossible today that are “merely” very hard, like full reuse, getting launch costs same order of magnitude as transpacific air freight, orbital datacenters, terraforming Mars, space settlement in general, travel to other star systems, etc.
Nah, it was everything. Everyone expects aerospace timelines to slip. That wasn’t the issue. I had an aerospace greybeard (guidance and navigation expert… nice guy, btw) from a civilian space agency that you would recognize tell me that booster landing on a droneship was “impossible.”
That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war. If there was political will, then the area around the Hormuz strait would’ve been seized, as well as the nuclear sites secured. Carpet bombing, too, not just surgical strikes.
That isn’t precisely what was decided in those cases, either (even though this gets repeated constantly on the internet as if it was). Again, the fundamental point of this case (and some similar cases) is just that you cannot assign IP to an AI. It has to be assigned to a person.
No. The court is saying you cannot assign IP rights to an AI, as this guy was trying to do. They are not saying it cannot be protected (as /r/antiai folk are always claiming). That’s another thing.
Because the “AI slop is uncopyrightable” people are misunderstanding court rulings like this. It’s not that AI output can’t by protected by IP, it’s that AI is not a person and so you can’t assign IP rights to it. You CAN assign IP rights to the human who did it (if they can show it’s non-trivial, like a haiku or photographer).
That isn’t what the courts have decided. They just decided it has to be a human on the patent application name. You can use whatever tool you want to get there, but if you patent a thing, it has to be a human in the name.
Information is actually tangible. It’s not just an analogy or a coincidence that the word “entropy” is a word used in both physics and computer science (information theory). Thermodynamics, mind you, is perhaps THE most fundamental elements of physics and how the universe works.