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Articles

Vol. 54 No. 1 (2025): Law and Social Bonds nr 1 (54) 2025

The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Assessing the Novelty of an Invention

DOI
https://doi.org/10.36128/PRIW.VI54.1167
Submitted
December 20, 2024
Published
2025-05-09

Abstract

Novelty is one of the requirements for patentability. Its examination has recently become more challenging due to the availability of GenAI tools. AI is being used to draft patent applications to assist in prior art searches, and it is generating large numbers of disclosures that may have been generated without any human input. This raises the question of their eligibility as prior art. Consideration of this issue was prompted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which sought public comment on, among other things, the impact of the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) on prior art. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the problems identified by the USPTO and to present certain propositions from the selected submissions. As the paper shows, the observations made on the basis of US patent law are also valid for other patent systems, including the Polish one. Another interesting issue, which was not covered by the public consultations in question but which is addressed in the article, is the question of how the use of an unpublished patent application as a ChatGPT prompt affects novelty and disclosure.

The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the problems identified by the USPTO and to present certain theses from the selected submissions. As the paper shows, the observations made on the basis of US patent law, are also valid for other patent systems, including the Polish one. Another interesting issue, which was not covered by the public consultations in question, but which is addressed in the article, is the question of how the use of an unpublished patent application as a ChatGPT prompt affects novelty and disclosure.

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