[00:00:01] Speaker A: Want to protect your business, the time is near you've given it heart now get it in gear it's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Richard Gerhardt, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. Not an attorney, but I work at Gearhart Law doing the marketing, and I have my own startups.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to Passage to Profit, Everyone the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with startups, small businesses, and discuss the intellectual property that helps them flourish.
[00:00:35] Speaker D: It's time for IP in the news. Artificial intelligence. It's really been a big topic now in the intellectual property world. All sorts of AI programmers are trying to get intellectual property protection for the inventions that their software creates. And so we have here Mr. Stefan Thaler from Missouri, who has a software program called Dabbas, and he claims that Dabbas is Sentient, which I guess means that it's got human characteristics.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: He says, and I quote, there is a new species here on Earth and it's called Davis. I do want to give intellectual property credit for this article. So it was from Wired and it was written by Will Bettingfield, who's a staff writer at Wired.
[00:01:27] Speaker D: And so the whole story is really about how intellectual property inventorship rights, ownership rights are being challenged in the courts right now. All of the laws say you have to be a human being in order to get a patent or a copyright. And of course, there's a lot of people out there now with AI who are challenging that. I think it's really interesting. It's kind of scary to me because I think if you have AI, the number of inventions and creations you can come up with is almost infinite, right? And so you would have all of these machines that would sort of own all the new ideas. And to me that seems that it would be a big challenge for us.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: But part of the problem too, with AI is that it doesn't just start with nothing. It goes through the Internet and takes other people's work and then makes new work out of it. But it's still using other people's work.
[00:02:17] Speaker D: That's one of the big challenges with copyright works, because the AI software goes and looks at all the other artist works that are online and then it combines them using software and it comes up with a new creation that looks a lot like the old creation.
[00:02:33] Speaker E: Right?
[00:02:33] Speaker C: So it's going to have to be litigated in the courts, I guess. But I don't think AI's reached personhood yet.
[00:02:39] Speaker D: When was the last time you felt sorry for an AI description from Chat GPT?
[00:02:45] Speaker C: Can an AI do a firewalk?
[00:02:47] Speaker D: I think that's the ultimate question. I guess the moral of the story is watch what you put into Chat GPT. We'd like to ask our distinguished guests what they think about this phenomenon. Dave, thanks for joining us on the show. What are your thoughts on this?
[00:03:01] Speaker F: My position, as far as what I do, I think I'm pretty safe. I don't think anybody's going to come out there and replace me anytime soon. What I do find interesting is that if I want to promote my company or I want to write content or whatever, I know that I can go out there and use AI and it can create some really interesting content so that we could add to the website or letters or whatever it is. But from a physical standpoint of what I do for my clients, I've got no worries.
[00:03:28] Speaker D: Have you ever thought about maybe doing like a virtual firewalking? Somebody puts coals down in their backyard and you talk them through it on zoom?
[00:03:37] Speaker F: No. The thing about it is that I'm there for the specific reason we do things three ways safe, safer and safest. So with that in mind, if I'm not there to control the temperature, because when I lay the coals on the grass, which is what they walk on, I can bring the temperature down by hitting the coals with a shovel. We did a board break. We were pretty successful at that. Tony Robbins does one too. He does a board break and he sends the boards out to the people and there's instructions and the setup and so on so that I think you can get away with.
[00:04:08] Speaker D: So, Courtney, what do you think about Chat GPT, AI and all of these other new phenomena getting intellectual property protection?
[00:04:16] Speaker E: My husband Daniel, he actually has taken classes on AI because he just is very interested in it, so I hear a lot from him about it. We have used Chat GPT in different scenarios, but in this case where they're claiming like, intellectual property, I think it's interesting because there's one particular AI platform that's an image generation platform, and you can actually load in an image and ask it to reverse engineer it so it gives you the prompt. And in the prompt it has different artists. So I can understand how these artists are getting mad because in the prompt is their name and that's kind of what's building the image. So I think that walks a really fine line. And in cases like that, I don't really know how there's much grounds to get intellectual property because it's based off of somebody else's work. I think there's so much gray area. I do think, though, that it is very helpful in some scenarios, like website builders now have it infused into the platforms and that can help with writing copy. But as far as intellectual property goes, I think it's going to be really interesting to see how they battle it out in court and that's kind of going to be setting the tone for everything that comes after that.
[00:05:24] Speaker D: You make some interesting points and I'm just going to play devil's advocate a little bit here and say as an intellectual property person. I think most new creations are based on something that somebody has already done.
[00:05:36] Speaker E: That's true.
[00:05:36] Speaker D: That's one argument that the AI people have, is that, well, other artists create art by having looked at other paintings. Yeah, but I'm not sure that there's really the creative spark that goes into that.
[00:05:50] Speaker C: I don't think it will ever be the creativity of somebody coming up with something really new, because people that are true creators, they don't care as much. I mean, they want to make money from what they're doing. They have to support themselves. So they want the IP rights, but they know they can always create something new.
[00:06:04] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:06:05] Speaker D: So, Alex, I have a problem with that.
[00:06:07] Speaker G: That's the fear that we all have, right? As we create AI and it continues to evolve, where is this going to end up? How far is it going to go? So do we really want to give agency to AI and the machines to actually own IP?
[00:06:21] Speaker D: I don't think we do. It does seem like the courts are really in a position to kind of consider all of the big social issues. You need broad social input on this in order to come to the best decision. Of course, with our congress, who knows if that would happen? But anyway, so I guess the moral of the story is we don't know what's going to happen with AI and AI creations and who's going to own the copyrights and the patents that come from it. So I guess we just have to live in limbo and wait for somebody to make some more decisions on this.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Before we go, I'd like to thank the Passage to profit team. Noah Fleischmann, our producer, alicia Morrissey, our program director. Our podcast can be found tomorrow. Anywhere you find your podcast, just look for The Passage to Profit show. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and Instagram. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional. First. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next weekend.
