alt Hacker NewsAI use is slowly creeping into pure mathematics and proving theorems or providing legging to mathematical breakthroughs. Just go watch some Terrance Tao videos to see some recent work. In addition, theorem provers and the likes have been around for awhile. Some of these systems create novel ideas or bridge novel ideas in ways that are arguably not “obvious” in any sense of the term.
While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view.
I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.
No, I mean legally they should be considered obvious, as the difficulty to create them becomes small. It makes no sense to give someone a monopoly on an idea that anyone could get just by prompting an AI.
Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)