The Rise of the Machines? … “And, the name? A…I… Hart … ly”

The Rise of the Machines? … “And, the name? A…I… Hart … ly”

In the UK, there was a classic TV advert for Yellow Pages, and it focused on a person calling round booksellers and asking for “Fly Fishing, by J.R. Hartly”. For every bookseller, they say that they don’t have a copy, But it ends, though, with him finding the book, and then revealing that it should be posted to “J.R. Hartly”. It was a winner of an advert, as it touched our human soul:

But, with the rise of the machines, could we ever see a day when a machine would be able to claim authorship of a book, the copyright of the creation of original art, or even submit a patent? It would then be a strange world, and where the author of a patent might become “A..I.. Hartly” (sorry, for the pun!).

The machines will then truly take over, and where we could even hand over the whole of the copyright engine and patent system to them — as they could probably do it better than we can. It would be become part of the automation of law and the legal process. Smart contracts could then run the whole thing. It then spirals up, and you know how it all ends …

And, so, on Valentine’s Day, the US Copyright Office stuck a big stick into the heart of the rise of the machine and defined that copyright relates to:

“the fruits of intellectual labor”

and that:

“are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind”

They, then refused to register ‘its’ (the ‘machine’) ‘Work’:

And, so, while you might smile at the suppression of the rights of the machine, there is a serious point here. Can an AI-generated artefact, ever be seen as original thought, and who might own that? Famous artists have used machines to create their art for centuries, and then taken ownership of therm. So, why not a computer under your control? As Shakespere has said:

A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text

I suppose the rise of the NFT has shown that we can create unique cryptographic tokens for our artefacts, so what’s to stop a smart contract registering a unique method (as a patent) and its output (as a copright), and then going all out to find anyone who uses it? An AI generated solitor’s letter — generated from a smart contract and signed by AI Law & Family — could then be in the post as soon as you have posted it on your Web site. The follow-up letters and court action will follow soon after.

So, as some depicted a perfect world of beautiful AI-driven cities, with your AI assistant helping you through your day, on the other hand, we are increasing becoming a slave to this digital machine, and where we have an created one of the most extensive spying networks ever — with the machine knowing your every movement and your every thought.

Before our lock-downs one of the last presentations I gave, contrasted our existing world with the worship of the machine defined in Metropolis:

If you are intested, here’s Fritz Lang’s wonder movie put to music by the even more wonderful Kraftwerk:

In the case of the submission of the patent from machines, in 2018, Stephen Thaler (the creator of AI-patent generator system) submitted a copyright claim defining that the author was the “Creativity Machine” and that he was the owner of the machine — it was a “work for hire” request. In the following year, the Copyright Office rejected the application and defined that human authorship was required, and stated patent laws from the past:

[T]he Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS BY THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 5 (1966).

For Thaler, his belief is that defining human authorship is a breach of the US Constitution and appealed, but again this was turned down. While this ruling only applies in the US, there has been a similar approach taken on an international basis, and where the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works defines:

“the need for the author to be a human being and for there to be some intellectual contribution above and beyond that of simple effort (‘sweat of the brow’) or what may be called mere ‘value in exchange’.’

Conclusions

And there you go … you can go back to the worship of the machine, and Google can spy on you a little more. Anyway, … don’t tell the machines I have been speaking about them …

Postscript

Please don’t take this article too serious, but there are some serious points in there that need to be debated. I leave you with this: