A Tokyo court ruled Thursday against granting patents on inventions generated by artificial intelligence in a dispute over whether AI – and not humans – can be recognized as inventors.
The ruling comes amid ongoing debates over how to regulate generative AI and is part of a transnational class action lawsuit brought by Ryan Abbott, a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey in England.
The plaintiff filed a patent for a device generated by AI in 2021, listing the inventor’s name as “DABUS, an artificial intelligence that invented this invention autonomously.” Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) is an AI system developed by Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist and president of Imagination Engines, an AI technology company.
