2 ms·

I regularly attend conferences regarding AI in the legal field, particularly intellectual property. My goodness, I absolutely hate listening to these IP attorne

I regularly attend conferences regarding AI in the legal field, particularly intellectual property. My goodness, I absolutely hate listening to these IP attorneys attempt to explain AI and it's pitfalls. 50% of the time, what they describe as AI could simply be auto correct, the other half of the time it's this fictional all knowing machine. I actually got t-shirts for an upcoming conference that just say "Ask me about AI" so I can explain to these IP attorneys what it's actually about. Luckily I've been increasing my participation(s) on these panels so hopefully we can start to dispel some classic pitfalls. For a bit of context, here's my startup https://ipcopilot.ai/ https://ipcopilot.ai/

jclulow 2y ago
Is this... a service for spamming patent applications as fast as you can without paying lawyers as much as we used to? Can't see how that could exacerbate all of the deep problems with the patent system!
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Did a quick browse of their site, just going off that, it made me wince, it sounds like you wrote quite a negative strawman. It's quite plainly research aid software for attorneys, as we can also see from their comment re: listening to lawyers talk about AI as talisman. Do you have anything to cite about this company that leads you to believe this?
hakfoo 2y ago
Honestly, that's one thing that makes me optimistic about the current AI omnishambles: we now have ALL THE MONEY aggressively incentivized towards weakening IP protections, because it stands to sabotage their big bubble in trained model systems. As someone who'd love to see the whole blasted IP paradigm flattened from orbit, I couldn't be happier. One of my many problems with IP as a whole was that it creates a metadata burden: you have to be very aware of what your source material is, who owns it, and under what terms they offer it, because there's always the risk you're pulling in enough material to create a risk of legal action. This was always a risk for scalability, but it was easy to pooh-pooh for human-made productions. "If you write the Great American Novel/Codebase, you can always hire a few lawyers to manage clearance or redaction as necessary." A human probably has a modest possible pool of source material to work with. The typical developer hasn't read everything on GitHub so there's little risk of incidental infringement against 99.99% of the projects. In contrast, the current nature of GenAI is explicitly a product with tens and hundreds of millions of pieces of source material, and there's no way to negotiate clearances on that scale on an individual, human-centric way. Hopefully, what we'll get out of it is the mechanism for large scale mandatory licensing. OpenAI might pay a kajillion dollars to keep their models online, but the same tools might be available for someone who just wants to create smaller scale derivative works without having to fight with some author's estate who considers it a personal affront.

jclulow 2y ago

Is this... a service for spamming patent applications as fast as you can without paying lawyers as much as we used to? Can't see how that could exacerbate all of the deep problems with the patent system!

refulgentis 2y ago
Did a quick browse of their site, just going off that, it made me wince, it sounds like you wrote quite a negative strawman. It's quite plainly research aid software for attorneys, as we can also see from their comment re: listening to lawyers talk about AI as talisman. Do you have anything to cite about this company that leads you to believe this?

hakfoo 2y ago

Honestly, that's one thing that makes me optimistic about the current AI omnishambles: we now have ALL THE MONEY aggressively incentivized towards weakening IP protections, because it stands to sabotage their big bubble in trained model systems. As someone who'd love to see the whole blasted IP paradigm flattened from orbit, I couldn't be happier. One of my many problems with IP as a whole was that it creates a metadata burden: you have to be very aware of what your source material is, who owns it, and under what terms they offer it, because there's always the risk you're pulling in enough material to create a risk of legal action. This was always a risk for scalability, but it was easy to pooh-pooh for human-made productions. "If you write the Great American Novel/Codebase, you can always hire a few lawyers to manage clearance or redaction as necessary." A human probably has a modest possible pool of source material to work with. The typical developer hasn't read everything on GitHub so there's little risk of incidental infringement against 99.99% of the projects. In contrast, the current nature of GenAI is explicitly a product with tens and hundreds of millions of pieces of source material, and there's no way to negotiate clearances on that scale on an individual, human-centric way. Hopefully, what we'll get out of it is the mechanism for large scale mandatory licensing. OpenAI might pay a kajillion dollars to keep their models online, but the same tools might be available for someone who just wants to create smaller scale derivative works without having to fight with some author's estate who considers it a personal affront.