Marks and Clerk, the intellectual property specialists have just released their 2023 AI Report.
It contains some fascinating stats around patent filing for AI projects around the world:
- US leads the way alongside Europe, but China is catching up (slowly)
- South Korea has the most applications per capita
- MedTech / Life Sciences is the sector with the most applications
- Computer Vision is a primary area of research
But alongside the stats they begin to wrestle with some deeper questions:
- Can AI be an inventor?
- Similarly, can AI generated programs be copyrighted?
- If an AI agent is learning from copyrighted material, are its results in breach of copyright?
The ethics around generative AI, particularly in the creation of music and images is likely to generate legal proceedings around who owns the results, especially if it can be proved where the models have been doing their learning.
For instance, here is a short report about Getty Images suing Stability AI – there will be some fascinating legal cases, and precendents set in law to resolve some of these questions.