The awkward grant of patents to artificial intelligence

As exciting as all this might seem, this decision seems to be more of an aberration than the rule. Before it was finally granted a patent in South Africa, the DABUS application had been rejected by patent offices in the US, Europe and the UK. The European Patent Office (EPO), justifying its decision to reject the patent application, pointed out that the law designates a natural person as the inventor of a work in order to preserve her moral right over the invention as well as to secure for her the economic rights made available by the patent. In order to be entitled to these benefits, an inventor needs to have actually "performed the creative act of invention". While artificial intelligence algorithms today are capable of perform complex computational functions that are often way beyond the capability of humans, the EPO pointed out that in all these instances, the programs are doing little more than just following the broad instructions of the humans who designed them.