Maybe, assuming you are using a third-party's tool directly. But I guess I was thinking more about the issue of someone creating a process that is more easily r

Maybe, assuming you are using a third-party's tool directly. But I guess I was thinking more about the issue of someone creating a process that is more easily replicable. There are lots of instances of fairly fragile architectures that work really well in a particular application, but if you change some small part of that architecture, they fail. Now say I spend a lot of research time identifying that architecture and maybe even patent it as a process. I could even publish the methods of exactly what that process entails and somebody could copy it an use it. But I think that would be illegal (assuming AI can be patented in this way).