The UK Patents Court has ruled that machines cannot be considered an inventors.
The USPTO has issued a report. The USPTO rules have always been very clear that inventors must be "natural persons" to file patent applications.
A number of independent inventors have been experimenting with AI to draft applications to make improvements based on published commercial technology. It seems likely that the Natural Person requirement will not be overturned in the USPTO, and that the solution is as simple as naming the natural person who programs the machine as the inventor. But this raises the question of what the inventive process is, whether the operator of an AI computer can be said to be performing an inventive step, and whether an AI system can be deemed to poses creativity. Back in the late 1990's when I was working at Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Later Incyte Genomics) in Palo Alto, California, we used to file hundreds of applications based on consensus sequences for genes, ORFs and ESTs etc. All of this "inventive" data was computer generated. Of course the inventors were the programmers. Was this legitimate at the time? Is it legitimate now? Should it be?
