Can I just use AI for this?
Why pay to have someone write a patent application for you when you could have ChatGPT do it for free?
AI tools are very good at creating an output that looks a lot like a decent patent application. That’s not the same thing as something that is a well-written one.
We love efficiency tools at Simplify IP. In fact, we love them so much that we write our own for the automation of rote, repetitive tasks and error-checking in documents. We’re not computer scientists or software developers, though, so when we reach the limits of our coding skills, ChatGPT can really help.
A carefully crafted prompt, with multiple rounds of iteration to clarify what’s needed, can produce a script for automating a particular task in very little time. We can tell from even our limited coding abilities that it looks like the kind of code we need - it has the structure, the semantics, the quirks that distinguish code from plain language. Because it’s code, though, we don’t need to rely on our own opinion of whether or not it’s correct, because we can firstly try to run the code to see if it even works, and we can look at the output created by the code to see if it’s what we expected from it. Two built in levels of error checking - great! And if it spits out an error message or doesn’t do what we wanted it to, we can go back and try to fix it.
The big difference between having ChatGPT generate code and having it generate a patent application is that there’s no such error checking for a patent application. Or there is, but it’s done by the patent office when the patent application is filed, searched, and examined. But:
By the time any major errors in your patent application are found, it’s probably too late to fix them.
Imagine if, in our coding process we talked about before, we weren’t able to check if the code worked (or even ran!) before deciding that it was finished. Instead, we are only allowed to use our own coding skills to check ChatGPT’s output and decide for ourselves if it’s correct and does what we want it to do. And then, once we’ve made that decision, and we run the code and find problems with it, that we’re only allowed to try to fix it by rearranging or deleting lines of code - not editing them or adding new ones.
That would be bad enough, but what if getting the code wrong the first time meant that you could never try to write code the solve the same problem ever again. That was your one shot, and now it’s gone.
