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ARTICLE · 10 DECEMBER 2018

Inventorship In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial intelligence (i.e. AI) has been the buzz word in the past couple of decades, more so if one looks at fictional applications of AI in movies such as Star Wars and I, Robot to name a few.

South AfricaIntellectual Property
Thapelo Montong
Thapelo Montong
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Artificial intelligence (i.e. AI) has been the buzz word in the past couple of decades, more so if one looks at fictional applications of AI in movies such as Star Wars and I, Robot to name a few. Fast forward to year 2000, AI, although still in its infancy, has been applied in real life in the form of, inter alia, Dr Thaler's Creativity Machine, Apple's Siri, IBM's Watson, as well as Amazon's Alexa.

AI has grown to such an extent that superhuman AIs, i.e. so-called mother of machines, have been devised which can come up with inventions on their own. Although these AI machines do not have to obey Asimov's laws, at least for now, it is apparent that they have been developed to iteratively learn, without human intervention, from pre-processed data or tabula rasa to provide insights and solutions for which they were never programmed to provide. A question arises as to whom would get credit for an invention which was devised by superhuman AI with little or no human

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