3 Ways GenAI is Modernizing the Global Patent Process
GenAI has the potential to forever alter the global patent process. Here are 3 reasons why…
Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to forever alter the global patent process. Patent officers and lawyers can now use GenAI to accomplish daily tasks, including patent drafting, portfolio management, and patent filing–including patents across international borders.
It’s no secret that GenAI raises accuracy, ethical, and privacy concerns, but thankfully, there are ways to use GenAI to streamline patenting processes while still ensuring that all patents are bulletproof.
Generative AI 101: An Intro to GenAI
GenAI is a form of artificial intelligence that can process massive amounts of data to generate new and novel content such as text, images, audio, and synthetic data. While its roots trace back to the 1960s, 2014 brought significant advancements to the field: generative adversarial networks (GANs), a class of machine learning, enabled the creation of authentic media. While this has led to promising opportunities, like improved movie dubbing and educational content, it also introduces concerns over deepfakes and cybersecurity threats.
The most popular kind of GenAI is built on transformers and large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is responsible for bringing GenAI into the mainstream thanks to its user-friendly interface. Unlike older neural networks, transformers handle entire sequences simultaneously rather than sequentially. Neural networks are built to utilize extremely large models, which often contain hundreds of billions—or even trillions—of parameters.
These LLMs have propelled GenAI’s popularity because they allow massive models to be trained without pre-labeled data, resulting in more complex answers and a greater ability to track connections between words. In essence, interacting with the machine feels more human, and the outputs are more human and situationally responsive.
Despite early challenges like GenAI’s tendency to “hallucinate” and ethical concerns related to bias, and data privacy issues stemming from its reliance on large-scale data scraping, GenAI has the potential to revolutionize the many legal workflows and activities, including the protection of intellectual property. Below are three ways in which patent officers and patent lawyers can leverage the technology without sacrificing patent quality and while ensuring patents’ defensibility.
3 Ways GenAI is Modernizing the Global Patent Process
Faster Patent Drafting
Patent attorneys often review existing patents and prior art to determine novelty and non-obviousness. The goal of a patent is to craft a well-supported set of claims that secures maximum protection in the context of prior art and patentability regulations, requiring the synthesis of massive amounts of information.
GenAI can speed things up via its reasoning capabilities. It can generate and analyze large data sets (around prior patents and local laws), then provide insights about where the niche opportunity is within regulatory guardrails via straightforward, conversational text.
In the future, as AI technology improves, human involvement in patent drafting may become limited. Right now, however, due to the inaccuracies, bias concerns, and privacy issues, GenAI demands human oversight from experts who understand patent requirements to reduce risk. But through a hybrid approach––combining GenAI with human validation and review––patent officers and patent lawyers can still significantly reduce the time and money it takes to draft patents.
Management of Patent Portfolios
Clients with robust patent portfolios are better positioned to secure competitive advantages and avoid litigation. An effectively designed portfolio can also reduce expenses related to patent acquisition and prosecution, including filing fees, prosecution expenses, and maintenance payments.
GenAI is revolutionizing patent portfolio management by automating formerly manual tasks, making portfolio management more efficient and giving patent professionals to focus on important high-level strategy. Most notably, GenAI can swiftly screen vast patent databases, expediting the acquisition process and ensuring alignment with company objectives.
Additionally, GenAI enhances patent quality by identifying inconsistencies and gaps within portfolios, helping guide decisions on retention, licensing, and divestment. With Gen AI, patent lawyers can conduct competitive landscape analysis, detect potential patent infringement, and collect comprehensive evidence of infringement in advance of litigation––all in a fraction of the time.
Like patent drafting, these processes also demand human oversight until Gen AI improves. However, the rapid integration of technology signals a new era of efficiency and strategic foresight in intellectual property management, positioning companies for innovation leadership amid a global business and regulatory environment.
Risk Reduction in Patent Filing
GenAI can also be used by Patent practitioners to file patent applications, particularly international patents that extend across borders and jurisdictions.
An accurate translation is one of the most crucial elements in an international patent filing.
A translation of a non-English priority patent application is typically necessary in two scenarios: when filing a “national stage” Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application or under the Paris Convention.
The perils of inaccurate translation can be severe:
- HSBC Bank directly translated its U.S. slogan, “Assume Nothing,” into several other languages; in some languages, however, it meant “Do Nothing.” The banks spent $10 million rebranding as “the world’s private bank” afterward.
- Kentucky Fried Chicken’s trademark phrase “finger-lickin’ good” was translated literally into Mandarin Chinese. But when they opened in China, the trademark became “eat your fingers off.”
- Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the victim of a bad computer translation when it converted a 2016 speech from French to English. Trudeau inadvertently praised “Nazi innings” and “railroad stations in Motorola”—not the best message from a world leader.
GenAI can be deployed to speed up the international patent application process while dramatically reducing the risk of such errors. While earlier AI translation tools built on traditional machine learning excelled at translating text literally, the LLMs that power GenAI make it possible to use automation to review text, consider context, and rewrite the concept in the desired language through a more linguistically sophisticated lens.
In short, GenAI is able to consider cultural nuances and idiomatic insights, so the translation doesn’t just say the same thing; it means the same thing in both languages. GenAI’s unique capabilities have the potential to help clients avoid costly and embarrassing mistakes––if paired with human review by subject matter experts who understand local jurisdictional requirements and linguistic subtleties.
[On-Demand] 3 Use Cases for GenAI in the Global Patent Process
In this recorded session, Matt Sekac, Head of AI R&D at Welocalize, delves into the world of Generative Al and its potential impact on the legal and IP industry, specifically, the global patent process.
Global Patent Translation
Welocalize has never had a patent application rejected due to translation.