Through an interdisciplinary lens, this chapter provides an overview of the book and a detailed introduction to intellectual property (IP), exploring its conceptual, legal, and philosophical dimensions. Intellectual property, defined as non-physical property arising from cognitive and creative effort, contrasts with physical property. The chapter outlines the foundations of Anglo-American IP systems, encompassing copyright, patents, trade secrets, and trademarks, as well as the moral rights doctrine in continental European law. It highlights the role of IP in incentivizing innovation while addressing challenges posed by technological advancements, particularly artificial intelligence, and the proliferation of low-quality or misleading content.

The impact of artificial inventors is only starting to be felt, but AI’s rapid improvement means that it may soon outdo people at solving problems in certain areas. This should revolutionize not only research and development but also patent law. The most important requirement to being granted a patent is that an invention must be nonobvious to a hypothetical skilled person who represents an average researcher. As AI increasingly augments average researchers, this should make them more knowledgeable and sophisticated. In turn, this should raise the bar to patentability. Once inventive AI moves from augmenting to automating average researchers, it should directly represent the skilled person in obviousness determinations. As inventive AI continues to improve, this should continue to raise the bar to patentability, eventually rendering innovative activities obvious. To a superintelligent AI, everything will be obvious.

AI is generating patentable inventions without a person involved who qualifies as an inventor. Yet, there are no rules about whether such an invention could be patented, who or what could qualify as an inventor, and who could own the patents. There are laws that require inventors be natural persons, but they predate inventive AI and were never intended to prohibit patents. AI-generated inventions should be patentable because this will incentivize the development of inventive AI and result in more benefits for everyone. When an AI invents, it should be listed as an inventor because listing a person would be unfair to legitimate inventors. Finally, an AI’s owner should own any patents on its output in the same way that people own other types of machine output. The chapter proceeds to address a host of challenges that would result from AI inventorship, ranging from ownership of AI-generated inventions and displacement of human inventors to the need for consumer protection policies.