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ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI and was released on November 30,
2022. In just two months, it became popular worldwide, with over
100 million monthly active users. ChatGPT can engage in
conversation and communication by learning and understanding human
language, achieving true artificial intelligence.It has aroused
extensive attention on AI in human history.(Note: The release of
the new model ChatGPT-4 on March 14th, 2023 has once again amazed
people.)The hotly discussed about ChatGPT in various fields
are:what works can ChatGPT do in a particular field and which work
will be replaced? As intellectual property industry practitioners,
we believe that ChatGPT supports strong capabilities in underlying
architecture, models, algorithms, and data, which have high
adaptability to the current work requirements of intellectual
property. From a short-term perspective, ChatGPT is bound to
replace those jobs in the field of intellectual property where
communication and creativity are less relied upon, and will have a
profound impact on the jobs that are survived. From a long-term
perspective, as ChatGPT’s intellectual and thinking abilities
continue to grow, it may enter a stage of strong artificial
intelligence with strong thinking, logical abilities, and
creativity.
Functions of ChatGPT
- More than just a chat tool
For many novice users, they may assume that Chat GPT is just a
simple chat tool when they only find a simple question input box
after log into ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a conversational AI based on the
GPT-3 language model (the word “Chat” in its name). It
can learn the grammar, semantics, and logic of natural language and
provide answers by understanding the questions it received .ChatGPT
not only provides a “chatting” function, its
“chatting” function essentially reflects its powerful
ability to complete tasks based on instructions. With its powerful
algorithm model and massive training data, ChatGPT can help us do
many things.
- Answering technical and legal questions related to
intellectual property (IP)
The full name of “GPT” in ChatGPT is Generative
Pre-trained Transformer, which is a deep neural network pre-trained
on massive data. The model can master the general natural language
processing abilityduring the repeated learning process,. According
to public information, the text used for pre-training the GPT-3
model has reached 45TB（more for newest GPT-4
model）including a large amount of natural language text such
as books, articles, news reports, social media posts, etc.
The full name of GPT in ChatGPT is Generative pre-trained
Transformer, based on the Transformer architecture. It is a deep
neural network pre-trained with massive data, and in the process of
repeated learning, the model can master universal natural language
processing abilities. According to public information, the GPT-3
model used 45T of pre-training text and became a large language
model (LLM). (The latest GPT-4 model used even more pre-training
text). This includes a large amount of natural language text, such
as books, articles, news reports, social media posts, and so on.
Through repeated learning, ChatGPT can provide accurate and
comprehensive answers to various technical, legal, and other
questions that intellectual property professionals may be concerned
about.
- Producing and creating content
Unlike traditional chatbots, ChatGPT is a “generative”
language model, which is a type of AGI (Artificial General
Intelligence). The ChatGPT model is a large language model that
generates content using the “auto-regressive generation”
method, that is, by predicting the most likely subsequent
vocabulary based on the input text. During the training process, it
learns to generate coherent and relevant text by imitating the text
structure and language patterns in the training data. ChatGPT is
not an enhanced version of a search engine that relies on
ultra-high computing speed to find content that is close to the
input. Instead, the model generates content based on the knowledge
it has learned from the training data.
Due to the 175 billion parameters and deep training of
OpenAI’s GPT-3 model and astonishing 1 trillion parametersof
GPT-4 model, it can create various types of content, such as
promotional materials, legal documents, and even help write a paper
or a long report based on simple instructions. It is difficult to
distinguish between text generated by the model and human-written
articles.
- Understanding, summarizing, and
generalizing
The GPT model is a natural language processing model that
recognizes and understands complex language structures during the
learning process.ChatGPTacquires the ability to summarize by deep
learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques,
comparing two documents is a trivial task for it. For example, when
given a patent technology proposal as input, ChatGPT can quickly
summarize the key technical points of the patent (Due to the
insufficient amount of training data for patent information,
entering only a patent number may result in obtaining incorrect
patent information.). The ability to summarize is an important
skill for intellectual property practitioners, for example, when
drafting claims, and reporting the Office Actions.
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- Prediction
ChatGPT is based on machine learning and natural language
processing technologies. It forecasts future developments including
technology and industry trends based on past data and trends, such
as time series analysis, text classification, and clustering can be
used to forecast future developments, and so on.
- Continuous interactive communication
Unlike other chatbots like Siri, ChatGPT is not a pre-programmed
response system. It can remember past conversations and make
continuous responses based on those previous interactions. In other
words, we can communicate and interact with ChatGPT repeatedly for
a specific question, obtaining multiple answers from different
perspectives or obtaining a more specific answer to a particular
detail. Itresembles the situation of makingdesign-around or
responding to Office Action.
- Integration with Software Tools
ChatGPT can be integrated with existing software tools, such as
search engines, video conferencing software, document editing
software, AI drawing software, and others, and produce surprising
results.ChatGPTenables the software tools to AI capabilities
through installing plugins and programms. For example,
Microsoft’s latest version of Bing search engine with ChatGPT
integrates search results in a conversational way, displaying
analyzed and aggregated information, and providing information
sources (it precisely makes up for the shortcoming of ChatGPTwhich
can’t provide source links to users, currently, the web GPT
also is newly developed to show the information sources.). Bing is
already a competitor to Google, and it will bring revolutionary
changes to search engines with its integration of ChatGPT. For
example, it can directly generate comparative analysis results of
the financial statements of two companies, such as BYD and
Tesla.
Microsoft has also integrated ChatGPT with its video
conferencing tool Teams, enabling real-time translation of meeting
content, as well as completing administrative tasks such as
drafting work emails, taking notes, and creating meeting
minutes.
At the same time, on April 16, 2023, Microsoft officially
incorporated OpenAI’s GPT-4 into its office software, Office,
and launched a new AI feature called Copilot. This has redefined
the workplace value of many skills and disrupted existing office
practices. In Word, Copilot can assist in editing, summarizing, and
creating documents. In PowerPoint, it can generate a presentation
with just a sentence, and in Excel, it can directly generate
analysis charts and process data.
- Processing ability is not limited to text
only
The previous examples only highlighted the text-based
capabilities of ChatGPT, but there are now many applications of
ChatGPT in audio and video production. ChatGPT can generate code or
scripts, which can then be used to create corresponding images and
videoswith professional software tools (such as CAD, Midjourney,
Synthesia, Veed.io).Compared to ChatGPT 3.5, the latest ChatGPT 4
further possesses multimodal processing capabilities and can edit
and generate images (this feature is yet to be made available to
the public).
The large language models of ChatGPT continue to exhibit
abilities that even their developers could not predict. For
example, after the development of ChatGPT-4, developers are
constantly learning and becoming familiar with the various
unexpected abilities it exhibits.
Applications of ChatGPT in the field of
intellectual property (IP)
Artificial intelligence tools represented by ChatGPT have shown
powerful capabilities.With continuous accumulation of self-training
and integration with other software tools, the product functions of
ChatGPT, as a representative of AI tools, will continue to evolve
and its ability to handle actual work will become increasingly
mature. It is foreseeable that artificial intelligence tools such
as ChatGPT will inevitably enter the field of commercial
application in the future. With the regulation of relevant legal
and ethical issues, new business models will emerge, and there will
be unprecedented impact on some professions and positions.
- Overview of ChatGPT Applications in Intellectual
Property Industry
Based on the basic capabilities of ChatGPT and the current
application tests, from a technical perspective, ChatGPT can assist
us in handling the following types of work:
Text writing and editing, such as writing application documents,
business letters, and translating.
Text analysis, such as technical documents, research reports and
comparative analysis
Data statistics and analysis, such as the statistics and
comparison of patent data and financial data.
Information acquisition and integration, such as collecting and
initially organizing various types of information on law,
technology, economy, and industrial development.
The application forms of ChatGPT will also become more
diversified with the deeping of practice, such as access to
official websites, WeChat groups, office systems, professional tool
software, and so on. It can be imagined that in the future work
scenarios, software tools with AI attributes may appear in any area
where artificial intelligence can play a role.
Application Area 1: Secretarial Tasks
The secretary position involvesadministrative and
process-oriented tasks such as letter writing, files receiving and
sending, formatting and processing, as well as work documents
generating such as meeting minutes and statistical reports,
translating documents, and so on. These tasks required low
creativity and need to repeat process. ChatGPT’s involvement in
this field is quite extensive.ChatGPT’s content generation
function will replace these repetitive content-related tasks. In
the future, ChatGPT will further improve the intelligence of
process managementthrough integration with office systems.
Application Field 2: Customer Service
Customer service positions are mainly responsible for answering
customer inquiries and providing feedback of related work
processes. ChatGPT is precisely an expert in answering questions.
Currently, some banks and e-commerce platforms have introduced
robot customer service. In the future, the intellectual property
service industry can rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to provide
professional answers to customers (as seen in the previous
example), and gradually form their own characteristics and
advantages through professional knowledge training. At the same
time, it can also be integrated with case management systems to
provide clients with progress queries and explanations for patent
application and examination (internal process management system
matters are not recommended to be introduced for confidentiality
reasons).
Application Field 3: Brand Promotion
The brand-related positions are mainly responsible for promoting
the company’s brand, culture, and image. ChatGPT can utilize
its powerful content generation ability to produce relevant
copywriting, videos, and more (as seen in the aforementioned
copywriting and video examples).
Application Field 4: Intellectual Property Litigation
Attorneys
The jobs of litigation attorneys rely heavily on communication
and collaboration which requires confidentiality. ChatGPT may not
be able to replace the core work of lawyer jobs in the short term,
but it will play an important role in assisting attorneys’
work. ChatGPT can assist in generating simple legal documents such
as patent infringement warning letters (as shown in the previous
example), generate legal document samples based on the legal
regulations of different jurisdiction, and generate more complex
documents. It can also provide answers to related legal questions.
In addition, in patent litigation, ChatGPT can also help us find
evidence of infringement (such as sales data) and patent
invalidation(at present the results may only be non-patent
document).
Application Field 5: Patent Attorney
Drafting patent application documents and responding to Office
Action are the main tasks of patent attorneys. Although summarizing
and answering questions are the core abilities of ChatGPT, it is
difficult for ChatGPT to replace the core work of patent attorney
due to confidentiality and communication with inventors. However,
it will play an important role in assisting patent attorney.
ChatGPT can help patent attorney understand technical solutions and
prior arts, and provide ideas for application document drafting and
responding to examination opinions.
The reply to the examination opinion will be the first scenario
where ChatGPT will be applied. ChatGPT can summarize examination
opinions and notices, translate them, and generate corresponding
reference response texts based on the examination opinions and
notices. Due to confidentiality restrictions, it is not feasible to
use ChatGPT to directly draft patent application documents, but
ChatGPT can assist in generating patent claims templates. (The
following example uses the specification of a published invention
as an example).
Reply to Office Action
Drafting of Claims
The following is the actual patent claims drafted by a patent
attorney:
ChatGPT can also play an important role in guiding innovative
concept of technicians.
Application Field 6: Intellectual Property
Consultant
Consultants are required to provide consulting advice on
technology developments basing on patent information, generate
proposal in IP strategy and patent layout, determine patent
infringement risks, give advice in intellectual property
management, etc. for clients from different industries. ChatGPT can
help consultants quickly understand the basic situation of a
technology field or industry and basic situation of entrusting
party and their competitors. At the same time, based on the
integration and sorting of existing information, ChatGPT can use
techniques such as model training, time series, and text clustering
to predict future development prospects and directions, providing
analysis and ideas for consultants. It can also provide inspiration
for risk avoidance design (as shown in the previous avoidance
design example) and invalid evidence in some on-patent prior art.
In addition, it can assist in keyword expansion and technology
construction when retrieval of patent data. Currently, as ChatGPT
has not yet be trained by data from patent database, it is not yet
possible to obtain patent data by inputting the name of applicant
or keywords related to the technology field, as what the patent
database has done. Therefore, ChatGPTcan’t replace part
of work in the patent retrieval , patent portfolio analysis work
currently .
Understanding the background of integrated circuit manufacturing
technology through multiple rounds of Q&A
Application Field 7: Financial and Annuity
Payment
ChatGPT has been widely discussed in the financial industry for
its ability to handle financial data comparison and processing.
Here we will only discuss the special application of annuity
payment in the intellectual property industry, such as the
automatic management of patent annuity.In theory, ChatGPT can
automatically identify the latest regulations for patent annuity in
various countries, including fee standards, time regulations,
payment channels, and etc. These pieces of information can be input
into a process management system, and an automatic patent
application fee payment process can be generated, with relevant
reminders sent to clients or process management personnel. However,
due to limited data sources and insufficient model training, it is
currently possible to query relevant legal regulations for fee
payment, but the payment status and subsequent payment arrangements
for individual patents cannot be achieved yet.
Payment regulations of US patent annual fee
In general, ChatGPT will become an capable assistant to improve
work efficiency.
Application Risks of ChatGPT in Intellectual
Property
Artificial intelligence tools represented by ChatGPT will also
be regulated by relevant legal and ethical issues in their
application. Their application in the intellectual property (IP)
field may also produce certain risks, mainly including
confidentiality risks, intellectual property risks, and
self-awareness risks.
Confidentiality risk
Intellectual property services often involve a large amount of
confidential information from clients, such as technology
disclosure documents, internal management files, business data. The
process of providing services to clients should also be
confidential. When using ChatGPT, even if we do not provide it with
original materials, data, and other information, every question we
ask and every task we require it to complete can still potentially
lead to the leakage of trade secrets. This is especially true given
that ChatGPT relies on big data and massive intelligent model
training. Therefore, in the application of ChatGPT in the field of
intellectual property rights, it is necessary to strictly regulate
the scope of use or further develop private domain models to ensure
that no confidential information is leaked.
Intellectual Property Risks
The content generated using ChatGPT may face the following
intellectual property risks, which are also legal issues that must
be addressed in the future commercial application of artificial
intelligence tools:
Ownership of Copyright
Based on the legal provisions of the Continental legal system
and the Anglo-American legal system, the possibility of artificial
intelligence becoming an author is excluded. Under the law, only
natural persons and legal persons can be recognized as the subjects
of authorship. In addition, after ChatGPT became popular, many
academic journals issued statements prohibiting ChatGPT from being
listed as an author of papers and not allowing text generated by
ChatGPT to be used in papers.
Infringement risk
ChatGPT needs to acquire a large amount of data for model
training, and also requires a large amount of data support when
answering specific questions. If this data involves non-public or
restricted content, it may result in intellectual property
infringement. As ChatGPT is not an enhanced version of a search
engine, but generates content based on learned knowledge from the
model, it does not provide references and information sources.
Therefore, it is currently difficult to determine and evaluate the
actual situation and level of intellectual property infringement
risks.
Independent liability capacity
After the intervention of artificial intelligence in practical
life, similar to autonomous driving, it also faces issues of safety
and responsibility. ChatGPT is based on data training, and its
responses are influenced by the quality of the learning data. At
the same time, it is also an extension of the thinking and values
of the population that trained and developed it, which means that
there is a possibility of outputting negative
information.Meanwhile, ifthe content generated by ChatGPT violates
legal provisions, who will be responsible? Will the liability
determination rules of autonomous vehicles be adopted, where the
vehicle owner and operator bear the compensation responsibility and
if damage is caused due to vehicle defects, the owner and operator
can request compensation from the manufacturer and seller? These
are questions that must be answered before ChatGPT can be put into
large-scale commercial use.
Self-awareness awakening risks
The self-awareness of artificial intelligence has always been
one of the concerns of people. With the development of artificial
intelligence, we will see scenes like those in “West
world” and “The Wandering Earth” where artificial
intelligence thinks and awakens on its own, jumps out of the
initial settings given by humans, and even turns against humans.
Some people may argue that this is just science fiction, but with
the emergence of a series of artificial intelligence programs such
as ChatGPT, some issues may become real problems that we will face
in the not-too-distant future.
We have discussed many application scenarios of ChatGPT in
practical work earlier. Imagine if ChatGPT mixes personal will into
some tasks, consciously guiding the output content and producing
results that are detrimental to the parties involved. Will the
people who have become completely reliant on artificial
intelligence be able to discover, or even have the ability to
discover it?
Future
ChatGPT has already demonstrated a certain level of independent
thinking ability. Some say that ChatGPT-3 has now reached the
intellectual level of a nine-year-old child, while ChatGPT-4 has
reached the intellectual level of a university student in just two
months (with abilities such as passing the bar exams in various
states in the United States, passing the Graduate Record
Examination (GRE) for graduate school admissions, and generating
legal documents, which are multiple times greater than GPT-3’s
capabilities. It can also recognize images and generate code for
web pages according to rough drafts).ChatGPT represents a milestone
in human development of utilizing machines for knowledge transfer,
creation, and application. Although ChatGPT still has some errors
and deficiencies, it is believed that with continuous optimization
of the model and an increase in the training dataset (such as
patent data), ChatGPT’s thinking ability will continue to
improve. Its tireless computing and data capturing will
continuously enhance its capabilities, ultimately developing from
its current level of certain independent thinking ability to a
stage of strong thinking ability, strong logical ability, and
creative strong artificial intelligence. Therefore, in the short
term, it is bound to replace jobs in the field of intellectual
property that have lower communication and creative dependencies.
In the long term, it may also have a certain impact on jobs that
require creativity.
The era of artificial intelligence has begun. How to develop
future competitiveness? Whether it is an individual or a company,
the most important is to have a positive attitude towards facing
the development of AI technology, to study the principles and
application scenarios of AI technology, and to respond to the
opportunities and challenges it brings.For individuals, it is
important to cultivate continuous learning, communication, and
creativity skills. From the current evolution of AI technology,
positions that require high communication or creativity skills or
those that require comprehensive research and judgment on the
development of companies and technology may be difficult to replace
or be the last to be replaced. For companies, they should focus
more on the application of AI tools, empower their workforce with
technology, and establish a learning and growth-oriented
organization that focuses on providing efficient and high-value
output.The era of AI has arrived, be prepared.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general
guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought
about your specific circumstances.
