While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view.
I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.
Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)
I think if an AI solves a problem that has been known and unsolved for a substantial period of time dispute attempts then the solution could only be considered non obvious.
If we make AI that can do 6 of these things before breakfast then we should think of them as easy to obtain.
The distinction is that non-obious to a human was a property that denoted a degree of specialness. If AI could do those things with ease then they cease to be special.
It was that factor that led people to be awarded some form of monopoly over the creation. But if it is no longer particularly special, then it should be public domain.