You suggested patents are novel and if AI-generated then AI is engaged in novelty. It’s there in B&W tweet.
You then suggested the issue is an empirical one. Fine. Only natural persons can hold patents (legal fact). AI is a tool in the human process (techno-social fact).
What’s the problem?
Fair enough if you don’t understand what was written.
I tend to advise caution in interpretation at that point.
FYI those of us that study knowledge generation professionally are in fact in disagreement about AI consciousness.
The moving of goal posts affects your defense of AI innovation more than my critique of it.
Also, you assert AI can patent & we should let the query be empirically determined. I pointed out AI is not a natural person thus no patents. All of a sudden facts are irrelevant to empirical enquiry?!
Accepting AI consciousness involves a dubious form of ‘isomorphism hunting’: low-level dissimilarities brain-to-machine are trivialized & focus placed on similarities at high levels of abstraction.
A contrary is @davidgunkel.bsky.social’s relational account for NOT dismissing AI consciousness.
AI-generated drugs are using machines to augment a human testing & creating process.
E.g.: Underneath Exscientia’s ‘the machine did it’ hype is a straight scale & speed claim.
I’m rejecting the approach that claims AI-innovation not AI as a tool.
www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/15/1...
In all jurisdictions on earth, inventors are not natural persons. Patents go to natural persons.
This is just current legal fact.
AI augments the process whereby people create something that is patented. Why the need to cut the human out just to ‘recognize’ that augmentation role?
You of course know that humans are in the loop even in your AI outputs.
Training data is the human in the loop.
Animals can be inventive but they’re biological beings like humans.
I am arguing explicitly that you lack a good theory of why or how AI innovates.
Above you backtrack from a behavioural account, which I predicted you would.
Below you also backtrack from the claim innovation requires no thought.
“It just has to” is where you’re at!
No, that is not the problem.
It’s the non-discriminatory part that is the problem. I’m not sure you see the point of Chomsky’s ‘anything goes’ argument?
To avoid the behavioural theory of innovation
But now you need to explain how and why AI filters the outputs.
I think you’ve landed on a form of behaviorist theory of innovation and I suspect you’ll now need to backtrack.
Backtracking is good, though!
If you think it’s special pleading to refer to human specialness, the real issue becomes whether you face squarely the fact of AI non-specialness.
If we know all AI’s principles and modes of operation, we can readily discern incapacity.
Chomsky said the definition ‘anything goes’ captures all the rules of nature (including the fact of innovation).
But it’s so non-discriminatory it rules nothing out and is thus useless.
Applied to these random recombination = innovation arguments for AI?
They’re useless. Technically.
This novelty definition has the disadvantage of not escaping the Monkey on the Typewriter trap. As it’s said, with infinite time the monkey will type McBeth plus trillions of nonsensical plays.
Introducing goal-directed but devaluing intentionality = monkey on the typewriter.
Anti-pedestal allergies, targeting unwarranted abstractions = ✅
I suggest, though, you’ve went too far the other way. You’ve made innovation coterminous with whatever recombination manifests from a recombination operation.
Like fleeing principles only to embrace behaviorism.
Devils Advocate etc
Just because innovation is more random than suggested by Great Man Theory (GMT) only shows GMT is flawed, not that innovations are random. Affirming the consequent is a fallacy.
Hostile reading, maybe, but I’m prodding at looseness that lowers a bar just to save AI output.
Your argument for AI novelty has moved from conflating language & thought, to denying thought any role in innovation, settling for blind chance alone.
‘Recombination sans thinking’ is a high price to pay just to call AI slop ‘innovative’. You’re digging a hole
Angus Taylor talking cost of living pressure in Canberra’s wealthiest suburb - “hard times hit everyone” he said - is code for “you folks will be OK?
Where is the ‘magic touch’ assumption in my argument?
It seems you’ve imported it in, for reasons unknown.
Is it wise to conflate language and thought? That’s the methodological query I raised.
“A complete joke”
After the starting gun fires, Australian researchers have to wait 2–3 years before even starting the race.
Really clear article explaining the impossibly long new time-frames for Australian Research Council grants.
By @liammannix.bsky.social
FYI your argument to the effect novelty by LLM’s cannot be foreclosed, because human & machine both recombine prior ideas/training data, is flawed. You have to assume you can conflate language & thought to make the recombination argument work, and that conflation assumption is flat wrong.
We cannot assess degree of substantive or innovative claim because Kustov’s Claude-generated paper is like a Seinfeld episode in AI hype. Claims that claims are made but no claim, just self-referential reference.
You know what’s missing from that entire Kustov article?
A single word about what substantive argument any AI-generated paper made.
Think about that. The claim to fame is words were made to follow each other. Groundbreaking.
The real story is that foreign governments try to interfere with elections in the U.S. all the time. In 2020 and 2024, the U.S. had private and public infrastructure in place to catch them, call them out, and mitigate the damage. Now, those mechanisms are gone, intentionally undermined and dismantled by the Trump administration. Instead of securing our elections, it seems that the current administration would prefer to exploit the spectre of “foreign interference” to justify its own *federal interference* in the upcoming midterm election.
Yesterday, Trump tried to justify the attack on Iran with rehashed claims of "election interference" from 2020 and 2024. Here's my 2 cents on what that was all about:
katestarbird.substack.com/p/the-electi...
Considering Mearsheimer has been the darling of those saying Russia invading Ukraine is NATO’s fault, maybe they’ll now take more seriously how much that guy is full of shit.
Australia, where 40% of homes have rooftop solar and install cost is $0.50 cents a watt installed in a week versus $3.30/watt installed in six months in the US.
🤦♂️
www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-...
On the embedded politics of LLM’s and AI. Or, channeling Golumbia’s critique of cyberlibertarians.
tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...
Just remember, the guy who led the drafting of the IHRA definition in the early 2000’s (Stern) later repudiated it for its ability to be a blunt instrument suppressing legitimate political critique of the State of Israel.
Tom’s auntie can’t be a trolley if she is a red herring.
What were the posters? Can you post some and tag Albo, as I’m sure after Joy Division he knows a misfire when he sees it, right?
