Who owns AI's ideas? Disputing intellectual property rights

In 2016 The Washington Post unleashed a new reporter on the world, an artificial intelligence (AI) system called Heliograf. In its first year, it churned out 300 short reports on the Rio Olympics, followed by 500 brief articles about the presidential election, which clocked up pretty good engagement online. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly turning to AI to drastically speed up the process of discovering new drugs, analysing huge quantities of data to come up with new molecules that could potentially have a therapeutic effect. However, according to most legal and technology experts, this scenario is a long way off. "From my perspective, at present AI is little more than a tool that can be wielded by the creator of a creative work or inventor of a new technical innovation in the same way a paintbrush is wielded by an artist or a CAD [computer-aided design] tool by an inventor," says Jeremy Smith, chartered patent attorney and partner at IP law firm Mathys & Squire.