Libre Culture

If I remember correctly from a different post about this same thing, Thaler (the person suing to obtain copyright) developed the AI himself. I imagine that any sane copyright body globally would stand by the position that Thaler has the right to copyright/patent(/?) the AI itself, but that a generative machine learning program isn't able to produce anything eligible for copyright due to the very nature of how they're trained. (Thaler does in fact hold patent on the AI.)

Actually...I remembered something about what he named it, and in searching for more information I found that he was denied, and the decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court following a suit by Thaler, to have his AI named on a patent filing in the UK. Original filing was 2019, and final judgment was 2023.

Seems the "esteemed" Dr Thaler is trying as many patent and copyright bodies as he's able to in an effort to get his program recognised as eligible for legal protection on it's output.

He's named it DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience).... I may be jumping to conclusions....but he seems like a bit of a nutter......

He's attempted patent and copyright filings in:

• Australia
• Europe (through the EU's European Patent Office)
• UK
• USA
• New Zealand
• South Africa
• Switzerland

And he's been denied in all instances......is what I'd like to say.....but both South Africa and Australia allowed DABUS to be named as the inventor on patents. South Africa being an administrative decision, but with Australian courts handing down judgement that there's no requirement for an inventor to be human....

He seems pretty convinced that his program and it's associated machinery is actual, legitimate, bonafide AGI. Hard to find a description of the actual setup that isn't directly from Thaler's site and journal submissions, but it does sound like it's unique....but it's hard for me to figure out as a layman. There's reference in several places to

extensive artificial neural systems that emulate the limbo-thalamo-cortical loop within the mammalian brain

electro-optical attention window scans the entire array of neural modules in search of so-called "hot buttons,"

And there's several mentions of a "swarm of neural networks" but depending on what the source is this swarm is either entirely disconnected, or highly interconnected.

Regarding the "electro-optical attention window"....

From this paper on DABUS and the scholarly question of AGI and a program's ability to legitimately and legally invent things:

The underlying difference between DABUS’s structure and other common forms of AI is that DABUS is not directed what to invent. When DABUS discovers a new concept chain, its internal networks appreciate the concept’s novelty.80 To communicate its appreciation of a novel concept chain, DABUS rings these “bells” to alert Dr. Thaler of the idea. DABUS can then convey its specific, novel idea to Dr. Thaler through images flashed upon a screen or through text in the form of pidgin language. Even though DABUS primarily functions without a directional course, Dr. Thaler can also confine its knowledge to be within specific conceptual spaces, such as medical information, so DABUS will concentrate its thinking within that conceptual space to solve a particular problem dealing with medical information.