Intelligent Machines - Engines of Intellectual Property Creation? -

Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has become an increasing part of our daily lives. Many of us utilize virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, we interact with customer support through chat bots, and we receive individualized content curated by Netflix, Facebook, and Spotify. These services are increasingly powered by artificial intelligence, which some define as any artificial system that can perform tasks under varying and unpredictable circumstances, without significant human oversight, or that can learn from their experience and improve their performance. Such intelligent machines can include computing systems that apply machine learning or deep learning architectures that mimic the neural networks of the human brain.

Although the term artificial intelligence and the first AI programs were developed in the 1950s, the development of AI-based systems is now accelerating at a pace surpassing even experts’ expectations. This strongly suggests that in the near future, AI-enabled systems will become even more deeply engrained in our society. Within a few years, self-driving cars, AI-powered health care (e.g., diagnosis, personalized drug development, and treatment), and personal assistants (that can do much more than merely set timers and control household appliances) will be commonplace. Additionally, improvements in artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems may eventually challenge human intelligence in terms of creativity and inventive talent. With this context, intellectual property practitioners should reexamine the fundamental aspects of IP creation when artificially-intelligent systems are involved.