Blueshift IP is pleased to announce the release of its white paper “How AI Is Automating the Inventive Process and Its Impact on the Patent System,” authored by firm co-founder and software patent attorney Robert Plotkin. You can download your complimentary copy here.

Artificial intelligence technology is advancing at an incredibly rapid pace. Although recent developments have raised awareness about the ability of large language models to answer questions, search through vast amounts of information, and even write software code, few are prepared for the implications of AI technology that is automating the very process of inventing itself. Such AI-automated inventing is moving us in the direction of making it possible to create new products and services by describing the problems they should solve rather than by specifying how to solve those problems. Such automation of inventing by AI holds the promise of radically increasing the speed and decreasing the cost of innovation, and in turn democratizing innovation and freeing human inventors from tedious tasks so that they can spend their time instead on identifying new problems to solve and working cooperatively with AI to solve those problems. 

AI’s automation of inventing also raises questions about the role of—and the need for— human ingenuity. 

Every previous generation of automation technology has triggered fears that it would make humans obsolete, and the automation of tasks that previously required human creativity elicits this fear in connection with what we consider to be a uniquely human trait. Automated inventing also calls into question whether the patent system is still needed as an incentive to innovation and how to update and administer a patent system that originally was designed to handle industrial-age inventions. 

In this white paper, we explore:  

• How AI is being used to automate the inventive process;
• The impact of AI-automated inventing on inventors, innovative organizations, and the inventive process; and
• The implications of AI-automated inventing on the patent system.

At every step of the way, we address both the problems and risks of AI as an invention-automating tool and provide practical recommendations for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks of AI-automated inventing.