WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The US Patent and Trademark Office or USPTO published guidelines on Tuesday stating that artificial intelligence can assist in inventions but only a human being can be named as an inventor on a patent.
The guidelines effective from February 13, reflect the President's Executive Order, which focuses on making the U.S. the frontrunner of AI technology.
The patent regulator ensured inventors that their inventions involving AI can still be patented if they show human creativity and ingenuity.
The USPTO gave a hypothetical example where an inventor who simply asks an AI chatbot to design a critical part for a remote-control car would not be eligible for a patent on the car, because he or she didn't make enough of a contribution to the car's invention, CNN reports.
'Maintaining 'intellectual domination' over an AI system does not, on its own, make a person an inventor,' the USPTO said. 'However, a significant contribution could be shown by the way the person constructs the prompt in view of a specific problem to elicit a particular solution from the AI system.'
The recent guidelines stem from the Thaler v. Vidal case, where the researcher Stephen Thaler had named his AI system, DABUS, as the sole inventor in a patent application, which was later denied by the USPTO, followed by a U.S. court's ruling supporting the regulator's decision to avail patent to 'natural persons' only.
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