Chatbots have developed rapidly in recent years, and artificial intelligence seems set to cause disruption in many different sectors, including the legal sphere. But should you write something as serious as a patent specification using an AI chatbot?
The Premise
With the integration of generative artificial intelligence and large language models, chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, can now hold impressively coherent conversations, provide information on a near-endless range of topics, and create captivating images. They can be used to write (for the most part) well-written and informative articles, with the user inputting relatively limited information and having almost no prior knowledge on the subject.
For an inventor familiar with AI chatbots, but who has only limited knowledge of what goes into a patent, it would seem reasonable to use such a chatbot to write a patent specification for a new invention. The inventor could then file that specification in a patent application at the patent office to try to get a patent granted, saving on the cost of professional assistance!
However, there are critical risks to this approach.
Confidentiality
The most important of these is confidentiality. Your input into a chatbot is not necessarily confidential, since chatbots by default tend to use the real-world inputs and responses for training.
Under patent law in the UK and Europe at least, an invention needs to remain confidential until it has been filed. Therefore, by telling the chatbot your invention details, you may be unwittingly disclosing the invention and preventing yourself from having a valid patent granted.
Therefore, before inputting any information into a chatbot, it is important to determine the terms of use of that chatbot, and whether the input is considered confidential.
“You don’t know what you don’t know”
A patent is a complex legal document, and there are complicated requirements. You cannot add new material into a patent application after filing.
You might assume that the patent specification written by the chatbot meets the requirements for having a patent granted, since it looks fine and sensible by your eye. However, there could be a critical omission in the document. Since you cannot add in new material after filing to remedy that deficiency, this might have a catastrophic impact on the chance of having a patent granted.
For example, in patent law, you need to provide enough information in your specification so that someone skilled in the industry can reproduce the invention. You might provide only a vague reference to an element of your invention, since you felt it was not worth describing it further. That vagueness might lead to the specification being declared to be insufficient by the patent examiner, and potentially be unsalvageable.
A patent attorney, by contrast, would have been able to guide and explain where more information was required.
Scope of Protection
Not all patents are equal. Even if you have a patent granted based on your chatbot written document, the claims of the patent may well be unnecessarily narrow, or not directed to the correct inventive concept.
The patent might then be so easy to circumvent by a competitor that it is not worth the paper on which it is written. The time and cost of the patent application process, including official fees paid etc., would have been a waste.
Instead, from experience, a patent attorney can identify the most relevant and valuable technical inventive concept of your invention, which might not have been apparent to you from the start. The patent can then be written with an appropriately broad and valuable scope of protection.
“Patentese”
Patents are written in a specific legal language – informally known as “patentese”. Certain words can have non-obvious meanings dictated by case law – take the contrast between the meaning of “comprise” and “consist”. A chatbot is unlikely to use these subtle terms correctly, potentially resulting in a worthless patent.
Entitlement
An invention needs to have an inventor, and, legally, an inventor needs to be a natural person (not a machine).
The chatbot may well contribute extra details to the patent specification that were not provided by the prompt from the user. If those extra details were useful, not illogical “hallucinations”, and included in an independent claim of the patent, there could be a question on who the inventor actually is, and therefore a potential question over ownership.
Conclusion
For experienced chatbot users, writing a patent using a chatbot is a tempting prospect. However, there are numerous critical risks to this approach that could result in the patent being invalidated or found to be worthless.
You need to carefully consider your long-term aim of applying for a patent. Whether the patent is to be licenced or sold in due course, or to be used to protect valuable sales, potential licensees, buyers and competitors will always try to devalue your patent. If a patent drafted by an AI chatbot did grant against the odds, you can expect such licensees, buyers and competitors to use this fact to ruthlessly undermine the value of it.
If you would like to discuss protecting your invention with a real person, who is also a chartered and regulated patent attorney, please do not hesitate to contact us on +44 (0) 1242 691 801 or complete the form below.
Author
