Artificial intelligences (AIs) are incapable of creating without human assistance and should be unable to hold patents, a new UK copyright consultation has found.

A recent consultation from the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) was created to advise the UK Government on how to treat AI over patent and copyrights. The consultation solicited opinions from a wide range of groups, including business and academia.

According to the majority of experts consulted, AI is a tool used by human inventors and is incapable of inventing without significant human intervention.

Both the UK and Scotland are keen to utilise the transformative power offered by AI. Released last year, the UK AI Strategy aims to make the country a ‘superpower’ in the technology over the next decade.

The plan envisions creating additional AI R&D programmes, building a governance and regulation regime, and promoting its adoption.

AI has come into the spotlight recently after an engineer at Google claimed that an AI system was sentient. LaMDA, or Language Models for Dialog Applications, is capable of writing fluently and accurately, discussing its feelings, thoughts, and even its own mortality.

While it resulted in many sceptics noting that AIs accurately modelling human languages do not mean they are sentient, it did force the idea of artificial consciousness into mainstream discourse. If an AI could be considered sentient, by whatever degree or metric, could they also receive rights?

The new consultation notes that AI could soon be creating things where the human input is almost impossible to identify, if it hasn’t happened already. If AIs were given similar rights as people, they would be able to hold intellectual property.

While many respondents for the consultation acknowledged that AI is not yet advanced enough to invent without human intervention, there is still the potential that it could reach a stage where they could invent autonomously.

With IP laws helping protect inventions and creators, they are vital to protecting innovation across the UK’s economy. As such, it is vital to ensure legislation considers the advances in AI, both to protect and encourage innovation.

There were three areas for AI-produced or assisted works the IPO consultation covered.

The first was for computer-generated works (CGWs) generated by computers without human assistance. At present, these are currently protected in the UK for 50 years, the same as human-generated works.

“There is no evidence at present that protection for CGWs is harmful, and the use of AI is still in its early stages,” the IPO noted.

“As such, a proper evaluation of the options is not possible, and any changes could have unintended consequences. We will keep the law under review and could amend, replace or remove protection in future if the evidence supports it.”

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The second area was text and data mining (TDM), where computers analyse information to identify patterns. This is an important technique for training AIs.

Despite its use in creating copyrighted works, the trends found through TDM are not currently protected. Furthermore, drawing from copyrighted data sources counts as an infringement, unless done under licence.

The IPO advised introducing a new copyright and database exception which allows TDM for any purpose. Rights holders will still have safeguards to protect their content, including a requirement for lawful access.

Finally, the IPO explored AI-devised inventions. Since most experts felt that AI is not yet advanced enough to invent without human intervention, the group advised no changes to UK patent law.

“But we will keep this area of law under review to ensure that the UK patent system supports AI innovation and the use of AI in the UK. We will seek to advance AI inventorship discussions internationally to support UK economic interests,” the IPO consultation noted.

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