Artificial Intelligence and Patent Law
Fatma Dilara Isler Albayrak · 2024
With modern artificial intelligence (AI) research gaining momentum in the 20th century, AI technology has developed rapidly and brought ground-breaking innovations in many sectors. Since the 2000s, AI technologies have seen remarkable advancement with the spread of the internet and big data sources. Significant achievements have been made in domains like natural language processing, deep learning, and image/voice recognition. In recent years, AI has been used in many areas such as automation, robotics, driverless vehicles, medical diagnosis, translation, and personal digital assistants. AI has become a part of our daily lives due to its use in different fields. The development of AI pushes the limits of existing legal regulations, moves legal systems beyond traditional methods, and leads to the emergence of new regulations, discussions, norms, and standards. One of the branches of law affected by AI is the intellectual property law. The matter of AI’s ownership of inventions under patent law continues to be a subject of debate, with no clear legal consensus reached yet. The question of whether the AI itself or its human user will be considered as the inventor is a problem waiting to be solved. It’s imperative that patent law evolves alongside advancements in AI. In this way, AI inventions can be encouraged, and innovations can be protected. In the light of the above, this study will include the patent applications made in many countries for DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), which is the invention of AI, and the evaluations of patent offices regarding generative AI within the scope of this application.