The CLE presentation begins with an introduction to the law of inventorship in United States patent applications; who qualifies to be named as an inventor, why it matters that inventors are properly named on an application, and what happens when inventors are not named properly.

The basics of what constitutes “artificial intelligence” and the sorts of things that artificial intelligences are inventing are touched upon, and then the status of a recent USPTO decision on the acceptability of a patent application naming an artificial intelligence as the inventor is reviewed. Finally, some ideas about the propriety of naming an artificial intelligence as an inventor and how that might work are considered.