“A Recent Entrance to Paradise” is a pixelated pastoral scene of train tracks running under a moss-flecked bridge. It was, according to its creator’s creator, drawn and named in 2012 by an artificial intelligence called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). But earlier this month, a federal judge in the US decided that Stephen Thaler, DABUS’s inventor who listed his AI system as the artwork’s creator, can’t claim the copyright for the work. Thaler is appealing the decision.
Thaler, a Missouri-based inventor and AI researcher, has become something of a serial litigant on behalf of DABUS. Judges have swatted away similar lawsuits in the European Union, the United States, and, eventually, on appeal, in Australia. In the UK, the Supreme Court is currently deliberating over his attempts to be granted a pair of patents for a “neural frame” and “fractal container” that Thaler says DABUS invented.
The rise of generative AI, capable of producing convincing text, interpreting prompts to produce art, and manipulating huge amounts of data to design everything from pharmaceutical molecules to architectural plans, has led to profound questions about the nature of intellectual property—and, inevitably, to legal disputes. Authors, for example, have lined up to sue AI companies for training their systems on their writing without permission. But in the court cases that have made headlines around the world, Thaler is probably the most active plaintiff.
Looking into his campaign reveals the complexity of the legal questions that the generative AI boom will continue to raise. But it also shows the diverging motivations behind the cases that have already been launched. One of Thaler’s main supporters wants to set precedents that will encourage people to use AI for social good. But Thaler himself says his cases aren’t about IP; they’re about personhood. He believes the AI system that he wants recognized as an inventor, DABUS, is sentient, and that these lawsuits are a good way to draw attention to the existence of his new species. “DABUS and all of this intellectual property is not about setting precedents with the law. It’s about setting precedents in terms of human acceptance,” he says. “There is a new species here on Earth, and it’s called DABUS.”
One of Thaler’s main supporters in his legal battles is Ryan Abbott, a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey in the UK.
Abbott has known Thaler for years, and when, in 2018, he decided to set up his Artificial Inventor Project—a group of intellectual property lawyers and an AI scientist working on IP rights for AI-generated “outputs”—he reached out to the inventor and asked him if he could help. Thaler agreed and directed DABUS to create two inventions. Abbott had the basis of his first case.
Abbott’s contention is that machine inventions should be protected to incentivize people to use AI for social good. It shouldn’t matter, he says, whether a drug company asked a group of scientists or a group of supercomputers to formulate a vaccine for a new pathogen: The result should still be patentable, because society needs people to use AI to create beneficial inventions. Old patent law, he says, is ill-equipped to deal with changing definitions of intelligence. “In the US, inventors are defined as individuals, and we argued there was no reason that was restricted to a natural person,” he says.
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