AI machines as inventors: The role of human agency in patent law

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing concern about the detrimental impact that artificial intelligence (AI) machines are having on patent law. While these accounts rest on a simple historical claim, namely that AI machines create novel and unprecedented problems for the law, they are largely ahistorical. To begin the process of rectifying this oversight, this chapter examines one of the assumptions that is supposedly being challenged by AI-machines, namely the idea that inventorship in patent law is an exclusively human activity. To do this, I look at the strategies US patent law used in the early to mid-part of the twentieth century to embrace the non-human agency associated with the generation of organic chemical compounds and what this means for AI machines as inventors.