AI's challenge to businesses: patenting machine-created intellectual property

Is it the German operators that created the AI in 2016, or is it the deep learning machine itself? That was one of the questions a panel of intellectual property experts grappled with at an AI conference in Toronto hosted by Osgoode Hall Law School last week. As businesses struggle to keep step with the rapid advancement in AI, policies and laws are also being stretched, said lawyer Carole Piovesan of McCarthy Tetrault LLP. "Canada is really at the precipice, as is much of the world, of trying to define what its legal framework is going to look like in the face of AI," she said. "But with the current pace of AI innovation -- it's happening so quickly and it's of such a transformative nature -- that policy-makers are being forced to anticipate issues that don't necessarily exist here and now."