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Patents invented by Machine Learning

A few months ago I read an interesting post, which I felt compelled to write about. The post titled “Australian Court determines that an Artificial Intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of patent law” tells exactly what its title denotes. The case in question comes from the drugs industry, which has always been an avid user of the patent system, but one can easily see how the verdict can be applied to many (if not all) patent areas as well.

The article reads:

“In Australia, a first instance decision by Justice Beach of the Federal Court has provided some guidance: pursuant to Thaler v Commissioner of Patents (2021) FCA 879, an AI system can be the named inventor for an Australian patent application, with a person or corporation listed as the applicant for that patent, or a grantee of the patent.” [...] Worldwide, this is the first court decision determining that an AI system can be an inventor for the purposes of patent law.” [...] “The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), and US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) each determined that an inventor must be a natural person.”

An appeal process is still ongoing, but this judgment still serves as an important milestone in the anticipated future of artificial intelligence, which bears enough resemblance to traditional human intelligence to demand similar treatment, first as art, and now also as the subject of patents.

I must admit that when I first read this article it seemed to me as a joke, and even a funny one at that. However, as I kept thinking about it, it made more and more sense. The purpose of this post is to take you through my thought process.

Just note that I am not a lawyer, not a patent attorney, and only express an opinion as someone who’s nowhere close to being authoritative on the subject.

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Machine generated content helping spread fake news

I recently participated in a discussion about the role of machine-generated text in the spread of fake news.

The context of this discussion was the work titled: How Language Models Could Change Disinformation. The progress made by the industry in the area of algorithmic text generation has led to concerns that such systems could be used to generate automated disinformation at scale. This report examines the capabilities of GPT-3 — an AI system that writes text, to analyze its potential use for promoting disinformation (i.e., fake news).

The report reads:

In light of this breakthrough, we consider a simple but important question: can automation generate content for disinformation campaigns? If GPT-3 can write seemingly credible news stories, perhaps it can write compelling fake news stories; if it can draft op-eds, perhaps it can draft misleading tweets.

Following is my take on this.

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One blessing of the Cybersecurity Executive Order

On May 12th, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order that was written to improve the overall security posture of software products that the government buys from the private sector. Recent events, such as the SolarWinds hack, contributed to the realization that such a move is necessary.

This Executive Order is a big deal. Of course, nothing will change overnight, but given the size and complexity of the software industry, as well as the overall culture behind software security (the culture of: “If the customer doesn’t see it — don’t spend money on it”), an Executive Order can probably yield the closest thing to immediate improvement that we could reasonably wish for. The US Government is a very large customer, and all major vendors will elect to comply with its requirements rather than cross it all off their addressable markets.

A lot has been written on how important it is for the government to use its buying power (if not its regulatory power) to drive vendors into shipping more secure products. Product security suffers from what could best be described as a market failure condition, which would call for such regulatory intervention.

To not overly repeat the mainstream media, I would like to focus on one unique aspect of the current Executive Order, and on how it can ignite a new trend that will change product and network security for the better. I’ll discuss true machine-readable security documentation.

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The role of security focused alternatives

Our digital lives are more or less governed by very few providers of products and services. Our desktop computing is almost invariably based on Microsoft Windows, our document collaboration is most likely based on either Google Docs or on O365, our instant messaging is either Whatsapp or Slack, our video collaboration is either Teams or Zoom, etc. Given the prevalence of digital life and work, you would expect more options to exist. However, all those large pies seem to each be divided into just a few thick slices each. Those lucky providers that won their dominance did so by catering to the needs of the masses while serving their own agendas, or more accurately: by serving their own agendas while giving enough to make their products preferable by the masses.

Customers appreciate ease of deployment and ease of use, and all of the dominant products excel in that. However, customers never said anything too explicit about security and customers never demanded data sovereignty. Those properties are also very non-compelling for some providers, either because they increase cost, because they prevent lock-in, or because they hinder business models that rely on using customer data. The vast majority of customers never really required, and hence never really got, anything more than ease of use and ease of deployment, along a few key functional features. For most customers, this is enough, but customers who also require security, privacy, and/or data sovereignty, face a challenge when working out alternatives.

But alternatives do exist, for desktop computing, for collaboration and for messaging and video communication. Those alternatives play an important role in our digital ecosystem, even if most people never care to use them.

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Your Bitcoin wallet will never be your bank account

Don’t get me wrong; Bitcoin and crypto currencies are a big deal, at least technology-wise. Bitcoin and blockchains taught us a lot on what can be done with security protocols, and at a lower level, it even taught us that computation inefficiency is not always a bad word, but something that can yield benefits, if that inefficiency is properly orchestrated and exploited. It was also the most prevalent demonstration of scarcity being artificially created by technology alone. As I wrote before, blockchains will probably have some novel use-cases one day, and Bitcoin, aside of being a mechanism for transferring money, also provides a target of speculation, which in itself can be (and is) monetized.

What I truly do not understand are the advocates who see Bitcoin wallets as the near-future replacement for bank accounts, and Bitcoin replacing banks (and other financial institutions) in the near future. I understand the motivation, as those are dreams easy to fall for, but for crypto-currency wallets to replace financial institutions much more is needed, and for the sake of this discussion I will not even delve into the many technical difficulties.

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The Fake News problem will not be solved by technology

One reason we struggle with finding a solution to the fake news problem is that we have never defined the problem properly. The term “fake news” started as referring to publications that look like news but are entirely fabricated. It then migrated to consist also of news articles that are just grossly inaccurate, to later expand further into consisting also of news one doesn’t like and tries to dispute.

It is amusing to see how we seek technical mitigation towards a problem which is entirely semantic. Just like a lie detector does not detect untruths but only the artifacts of a lying person, all technologies that are considered for fighting fake news do not detect untruths but mostly willful propaganda. However, just like plain deceiving, publishing propaganda also consists of many shades of grey, implying that whatever solutions we find, we will never be happy with them.

We should recalculate our route.

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Time to reclaim the Internet

We grow increasingly reliant on quite a few Internet-based services: social networks, messaging, photo sharing, and the rest. The challenges we face with privacy, data ownership enforcement, surveillance, and other aspects of digital abuse could all be substantially reduced if those data sharing needs were addressed by the Internet as it was originally architected: decentralized and open. We have waited very long, and so remediation would take more than just new standards, but it is doable.

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Book review: "Data and Goliath"

After sitting in my reading list for years, I finally got to read “Data and Goliath” by Bruce Schneier. Overall, this book is as well written as all of Schneier’s books, and is just as scientifically accurate (to the best that I could tell). However, whoever the audience for his book is, they may find it missing essential parts that make it not just a pleasant read, but also a useful one.

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Bruce Schneier on Israeli export control

I usually agree with the opinions expressed by Bruce Schneier. Seldom do I think that he is dead wrong, and yet less often do I think that an essay of his is bluntly unsubstantiated. About a month ago, he published such a post, titled: How Israel Regulates Encryption. He quoted a research that sounds sensible, but ended up interpreting it entirely wrongly, in my opinion.

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Why secure e-voting is so hard to get

A few days ago I gave a lecture about innovation and one topic that came up was the security of e-voting. It is widely accepted by the security community that e-voting cannot be made secure enough, and yet existing literature on the topic seems to lack high level discussion on the basis for this assumption.

Following is my opinion on why reliable fully digital e-voting cannot be accomplished given its threat and security models.

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