Can a robot be an inventor? A new patent filing aims to find out

A new patent filing in the U.K. aims to find out. An international team led by AI activist Ryan Abbott, a law professor at the University of Surrey, has filed the first-ever patent applications for two inventions created autonomously by artificial intelligence without a human inventor. The AI inventor, named DABUS by its creator, Stephen Thaler, was previously best known for creating surreal art, but it was designed to come up with new ideas and then assess those ideas for consequences, novelty, and salience. So far the series of neural networks that makes up DABUS has come up with two ideas that may be worth patenting. According to a press release, one patent application is for "a new type of beverage container based on fractal geometry," which sounds pretty sweet, while the other is for a device that can help attract attention that could be useful in search and rescue operations.