The lawyers I know are very fixated on the problem of hallucinated case citations which is amusing to me as a onetime programmer, since case citations have a well-defined syntax and would be relatively easy to check programmatically.
Which makes it all the more bizarre that LLMs have this problem. Claude Code runs the code it generates through a compiler, why can’t an LLM run its product through a cite checker? I’ve seen LLMs fabricate citations.
In the podcast, Cal Newport repeats at least 20 times that agentic AI is nothing more than an LLM execution loop, as if this is some kind of trump card, taking for granted the usual stochastic parrot trope. At no point does he even consider the possibility that the LLM output itself is noteworthy. These people are permanently stuck in November 2022.
Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
Before reading The Stranger, I was headlong into the then-popular "New Atheism" movement, which came with a certain air of superiority of brainpower over the naive masses. But reading The Stranger had a profound impact on me, even before I knew anything more formal about existentialist philosophy.
It was an awakening: I began to understand that the problem with the world isn't that everyone needs to learn more physics and think more like me. The problem is that none of this stuff -- life -- really means anything; that's a hard pill for lots of people to swallow (understandably); and our stupid little lives are just 80 years or so of farting around and trying to forget about what is obvious (h/t to KV).
The book ultimately softened my overly critical views about religion and superstition and helped me mature into someone much more sympathetic to the various weird things that people think and do.
Stupid and little in relation to _what_? You cannot ascribe lives as stupid or little unless you’ve got a smart and a grand. So: what is the smart and grand you’ve got? I want to take note of it.
Have not read it yet, but recently researched this question and came to this book as a readable overview of the latest thinking in cosmology, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins by Afshordi and Halper [1].
The book assumes a basic knowledge of physics and cosmology so it does not spend half the book reviewing basics like many pop physics books do.
I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.
Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.
The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.
To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].
The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.
That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.
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