Have you lost it all and gone broke on a business venture? What did you do? Did you start over? Come up Have you used artificial intelligence to create something? Maybe a new product, a service, or other new invention? Can such an invention or idea get a copyright, a patent or a trademark? Our guest today is Thomas Dunlap, who is an intellectual property attorney and he specializes in the use and protection of artificial intelligence ideas and inventions.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Use AI, but be cautious.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Thomas is a Managing Partner at Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig (DBL), a law firm he co-founded in 2001 and has grown to more than 80 attorneys strong and has a presence in 14 locations across the United States and the United Kingdom. DBL is active across law practices and industries, including aerospace, banking, firearms, entertainment, and retail. Under Thomas’ 20+ years of leadership, his firm has built up an impressive legal portfolio and a reputation for cracking multimillion-dollar cases. He has vast business knowledge, given his experience in advising industry leaders and guiding startups through funding rounds.
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TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Tom DuFore (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you have used artificial intelligence or AI to create something. Maybe you’ve used it to create a new product, a new service, or maybe some other kind of new invention. And can that new invention or idea that used artificial intelligence get a copyright or a patent or a trademark? Is that possible? Well, our guest today is Thomas Dunlap, who’s an intellectual property attorney, and he shares with us what ideas and inventions can and cannot be protected, at least as we understand it today, through artificial intelligence.
(00:52):
Now Thomas is a managing partner at Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig, a law firm he co-founded in 2001 and has grown to more than 80 attorneys and has a presence in 14 locations across the United States and the United Kingdom. His law firm is active across many different industries and practices, including aerospace, banking, firearms, entertainment, and retail. Under Thomas’s more than 20 years of leadership, his firm has built up an impressive legal portfolio and a reputation for cracking million-dollar cases.
(01:22):
You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
Thomas Dunlap (01:27):
My name’s Tom Dunlap. I’m an attorney with the firm, Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig. We’re about 75-ish lawyers all over the country, mostly in DC, Chicago and Seattle and New York. I’m also an adjunct professor part-time.
Dr. Tom DuFore (01:41):
Wonderful. Well, as we were talking pre-show about a new course you’re teaching is really this idea of intellectual property and artificial intelligence as AI continues to increase its use in the business world and other professions. So I’d love for you just to have a conversation about that.
Thomas Dunlap (01:41):
Sure.
Dr. Tom DuFore (02:00):
How are you seeing businesses use it and how does that impacting with intellectual property rights?
Thomas Dunlap (02:06):
So there are a whole bunch of issues. That’s like a 50-issue question you just asked. So first I’ll start with the class that I’m teaching is actually called Intellectual Property for Engineer Scientists and Entrepreneurs. It’s a call it ME 340 at Lafayette College. It’s a four-credit class that touches on this.
(02:23):
So this year the big deal was I had to take the course and add a section on AI. There’s nothing in the textbook, and as we were discussing before the show, what’s interesting is that there are no laws around AI and intellectual property. Congress has legislated nothing yet, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. Part of it is because it’s brand-spanking new, and part of it is that Congress hasn’t been unified or able to pass a whole lot of laws, but there really isn’t anything before Congress. So what’s happened?
(02:49):
So the USPTO, that’s the agency that governs patents and trademarks, and the US Copyright Office that deals with copyright, so all the registrable IP in the world is being managed by administrative agencies making up their own rules. And they’re not bad rules, but they’re having to look at what AI is, what it does, can AI own an invention, can it patent something? And people have tried to do that. AI has invented stuff, we can talk about that. Can an AI create something? Can it write a comic book? So there was somebody who filed a copyright for a comic book and she wrote the text, but all the images were generated by, I think it was Midjourney, which is one of the big AI image generators, and she said that in the application.
(03:28):
And what did the copyright office do? So it initially gave her a copyright and then it took it away and said, “You have copyright on your text, but the images, nobody owns what an AI generates.” And those were the questions that came up in class. Who owns what an AI generates? Is it the programmers, the people who own the engine? Is it you who came up with a prompt? Are you a prompt engineer? Or is it the people who gave the AI all of the content that it’s trained on, as a lot of artists are now arguing in lawsuits in California. So AI is crazy everywhere, not just intellectual property.
(03:57):
And then AI pops up, I’m teaching a course for the state bar CLE this coming spring about AI for lawyers and what is permitted. Can you use ChatGPT to write a brief? And the answer is you shouldn’t for a lot of reasons. And we talked about before the show somebody using it to write a contract that should have probably been about 100 pages and ended up being about 20, and so there’s definitely stuff missing. So AI is not perfect.
(04:23):
We have, and you already probably know this, there are different kinds of AI, and we do not have general AI. We have narrow AI, these large-language models, which are literally just massive collections of data, mostly from the internet, that are aggregated and collated in such a fashion that it seems like it’s magic. And it is so good that it emulates 90% of the dumber humans on earth, like what they would output. I mean that doesn’t sound nice, but you can have a conversation with AI like you’re talking to somebody you don’t know and that has a minimal level of creativity. It’s not that they know things, but their creativity is very [inaudible 00:05:03]. And it hallucinates, which we can talk about what AI hallucinations are if you’re not familiar. So that’s my start point.
Dr. Tom DuFore (05:09):
I love that example of the lady who wrote a comic book and her text that she wrote was able to get a copyright but the images were not. Are there maybe trends you’re starting to see or any interpretations that agencies are happening? Are there any state laws or federal rules or things that you see looming or coming or how does all of that play in?
Thomas Dunlap (05:33):
Here’s the biggest issue with AI. So first, large-language models are trained, and there’s a couple of cases before, I think there’s one about to be pending in the Supreme Court, but there’s definitely one pending before the Federal District Court, about all of these artists who write songs. I don’t know if you remember, I think it was earlier this year, Drake put out a new song, but it wasn’t Drake. AI created a song that everybody believed was a Drake song. And if you listen to it, and I would play it for you if I planned this ahead, you can find it on the internet pretty easily, it was generated by AI and it is a perfectly great song. It got really popular and then all of a sudden we discovered it was just an AI making a Drake song using his content. So one big question is all of that content, should AI have access to it to train?
(06:17):
I’m starting foundationally. The two sides of that argument are if you were an AI owner, Microsoft, Google, all the huge companies, which by the way, other issue, are now starting miniature nuclear power plants. In fact, I think it was Google that bought Three Mile Island and is restarting it with miniature… Because the energy it takes to generate these responses is massive, the actual physical energy. Sorry, digress.
(06:41):
So what happens here is you have all of these artists that have created all this content. And AI, if we were to say on the one hand, there’s two sides of this, “Mr. AI, you engine, you owner of AI, you cannot use anything that’s not in the public domain.” And what does that mean from a copyright perspective? Anything from prior to 1923, that’s all you can use. How useful is AI then if we’re getting answers about the world from pre-World War II? It’s great if you’re interested in flappers and what Teddy Roosevelt did, but it’s not really helpful.
(07:13):
But that’s the legal argument that you don’t own any of that content. It’s all copyrighted because under US law, as soon as you write something down pen to paper, we signed The Berne Convention in 1989 with the rest of the world. They signed at different times, but that’s when we signed it. As soon as you create something, you have a copyright in that as the original creator. AI does not, as we just learned a second ago, but that means that everything that AI reads has to have some creator somewhere that owns it, and it doesn’t own it.
(07:39):
The people that own AIs, their argument is we are not creating derivative works. So in copyright when you create something original, say you write a cookbook that’s fanciful or a novel, you write a Harry Potter, don’t write a Harry Potter novel, you get sued, but you write your own fantasy novel and somebody makes a derivative of work and uses your characters, they can’t do that. That’s why J.K. Rowling can stop people from writing, Harry Potter and the People Who Lived in New York. You can’t write that because she owns that and that’s a derivative work even though it’s not her original work.
(08:11):
So that’s the argument of the artist. AI is saying, “We’re not doing that. We’re just training the AI to know things.” Just like I can read a book about Abe Lincoln, I can read a book about Harry Potter, and I can write my own wizard book solely based on the information from that book. I can’t use her characters, I can’t make a derivative work, but all my knowledge about Abe Lincoln or the Wizards or Abe Lincoln as a wizard could have come from two books I read and nothing else, and that’s legal because copyright doesn’t protect ideas. And so what the argument of the engine’s owners are is that we’re not creating derivative works. We’re learning things just like a person would learn things and collating them and putting them together.
(08:48):
So that’s the argument that’s playing out. I think it’s a bigger challenge with images, and there’s a big case about images right now. The woman who did a lot of the artwork for Marvel, for Thor, she has a big lawsuit pending with a couple other artists who did a lot of the original creative work for the Marvel films, and we’ll see where that goes. But the key is that there is no law. There’s no federal law, there’s no state law, there’s not a single law around specifically artificial intelligence. The only thing we have in the US, and overseas, are rulings.
(09:20):
So I told you the Copyright Office, you can’t copyright something that AI made, and you have to disclose it. And you could say, “Well, I can generate it and not disclose that AI made it.” That’s true, but it would make your copyright technically invalid if you ever tried to enforce it and somebody could figure that out. So it’s a risk.
(09:35):
Patents, that’s the other thing that was big. So last year a guy had AI create something, this was two years ago, create a couple patents. He created a specific AI engine called, I can’t remember, DAFUS, DABUS. DABUS was the name of the AI engine. And he said, “Invent me something. Look at all the patents in this space and invent something. I’m not giving you any other directions. Just invent a patentable invention.” It invented two things. One was like a beverage heater, and I don’t remember what the other one was, but he took this to patent offices around the world and he said, “This is my patent. It was invented by this AI and this AI owns it and I want this patent to be granted.”
(10:12):
And every country, except for South Africa, and I think in Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia said this, “This AI now owns, a machine now owns something,” which is crazy. Talk about a slippery slope because now machines can own property. Do they have rights? Do they have human rights? Do we have to treat AIs a certain way? It’s not a general AI. It’s a large language. It’s crazy. In the US the patent office said AI may not own a patent. AI may not be an inventor,” but what’s neat is absolutely a hundred percent you can use AI to help you create patents as long as the human being took the inventive step.
(10:48):
So if you are writing patents right now and you are on the cutting edge of whatever technology you’re in, there is no chance you’re not using AI. And that’s fine, but you have to make sure that the inventive step is something that you, as a human being took, because only a human is technically capable of creating or owning an invention under US law. And that is not a law, that is the USPTO’s current legal guidance. They will reject your patent if you say otherwise. And they require you, also just like The Copyright Office, to disclose if you use AI. But I mean you have to use it in your daily life. I mean it’s a conversation we have and there are a lot of good ways to use AI and a lot of bad ways to use AI.
Dr. Tom DuFore (11:27):
Is the creative step then the prompts that he’s plugging in? Is he prompting with the right questions to ask? Is that the creative step?
Thomas Dunlap (11:36):
So when you’re inventing, the creative step has to be something that contributes to the invention. So if I just type in, “Invent me something,” there’s no creativity there. There’s not a creative step contributing to that. Let’s take the beverage warmer that DABUS invented. If I say to AI, however, “Create a beverage warmer that allows me to grip it firmly and does not hurt my hand and is warm on the inside and does not require an external power source, but is somehow powered by a battery,” I came up with the idea and it’s okay for AI to give me some iterations of that and then for me to refine that. That’s a good use of AI to invent. You’ve come up with a creative step. It’s like, well, here’s a way you could do it. And you’re like, that’s a good idea AI. That contributed to the invention, but I’m the one who came up with the invention. But if I just said, “Invent anything,” that’s not creative.
(12:26):
And there are degrees and there are going to be arguments over what that is, and the fact that we have right now in Americ, one case on that, and we don’t have any case law on it anywhere yet. There’s some stuff in front of courts, but not a single settled case or piece of case law or law, makes it hard. And that’s because AI is pretty freaking new. I mean it just is, but it is a black swan. It’s going to change everything, and it will be the biggest topic I think of everything in 2025. There’s no question.
Dr. Tom DuFore (12:58):
It seems like most of the time the legislators are the last to get involved. It’s things end up in court or wherever, and then finally federal Congress creates something to help create some minimum standard. But what do you see happening here?
Thomas Dunlap (13:16):
They need help. Well, so the Supreme Court’s case this year, Chevron, I don’t know if you remember the Chevron case?
Dr. Tom DuFore (13:22):
Yes.
Thomas Dunlap (13:23):
Something called Chevron deference, where congress defers to the experts. I’m a little worried about what they’re going to come up with from AI because some congressmen got up right after that decision like, “This is a great day. Now instead of experts deciding things, you have us.” And I’m like, great people who maybe have a high school education, maybe not, maybe they don’t, who knows. So that’s great. Not the experts anymore, it’s Congress.
(13:43):
So they use outside experts to write laws. Hopefully they will to write AI laws and they’ll invite a bunch of comments and help, but I think I see Congress starting to pass laws that are in line with what administrative agencies are doing. I think because we’re going to have to resolve ownership, we’re going to have to resolve what AI is. And remember, right now we have narrow AI. Every big company with billions of dollars, they’re all working towards general AI. They’re all working towards that big brain.
(14:11):
I believe the large-language models can already pass the Turing test, so that’s now an outdated way to tell whether or not something is a human or not, but general AI is a completely different thing. It makes decisions on its own. It’s kind of scary. It’s the sci-fi stuff, but it’s probably going to happen and we’re getting closer and closer as people take large-language models and start creating neural networks and start building nuclear power plants to support it.
(14:37):
So I think we’re going to have bigger AI and new problems in addition to these large-language models, AI that actually thinks. That’ll start happening, and we’re going to have federal laws that will probably legislate for the whole country. We probably will have corresponding state laws that will mimic the federal laws, but the federal laws will trump them because federal, I mean anything in interstate commerce, the feds get to control. And AI is definitely, since it’s all on the internet in interstate commerce. So I think we’re going to see federal laws, and we’re going to see new regulations from agencies.
(15:08):
An interesting conversation I had last Friday with a client who I’m working on some litigation for, patent cases, and they were like, “Our company was doing great,” and they’re in Silicon Valley and they do millions a year. They’re a good company in a good space, mobile technology space. But they said, “Unless your company has AI or is doing AI somehow, in Silicon Valley right now, you can’t get any money. The only people who are getting money is somebody,” basically you have to stick AI at the end of your name and do something AI. So I think that’s another interesting trend. If that’s where all the money is, especially in Silicon Valley, it’s a big indicator to me that I don’t know how you’re going to do it if you’re a pizza shop, but most industries are going to have to at least say they’re using AI somehow.
(15:54):
I know as a law firm if we aren’t using it in some fashion, we’re behind the power curve. I use it for note-taking. I do not use it for legal research. But I will tell you, you can ask AI to say something like, “Hey, give me some ideas on causes of action for this,” and it might come up with some novel stuff. But never ask it for case law. You can ask it for specific things. It’s wrong at least half the time.
(16:17):
And I will give you an example, Tom, so that your clients don’t use it, businesses don’t use it for legal advice. I asked an associate to do a research project. I said, “Hey, I have a client who wants to domesticate from Virginia to Maryland. They want to convert from a Virginia Corp to a Maryland Corp. It’s really a Virginia LLC to a Maryland LLC, and then into an Inc. It’s a whole thing, but that’s what they wanted. And I said, “Does Maryland allow inbound domestications? Research that.” I knew the answer because I looked at the statute. It took me five minutes, but I was like, “Research that. Give me a memo. Let’s tell the client how we do it and why, and I think they do.”
(16:48):
So I typed it into ChatGPT and ChatGPT is like, “Maryland does not allow inbound domestications,” and it cited the statute from the Maryland code, but the statute was from 2013 and it was amended in 2014. So it went on the internet, cited a statute, it looked really official. They do not allow it. Here’s the statute, here’s why,” boom, and it was completely wrong. You have to remember what you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a dumb large-language model that seems wise, so just word to the wise.
Dr. Tom DuFore (17:17):
As you mentioned these big picture ideas, and then you tossed in, well, what about the pizza shop? So it makes me think of the entrepreneur, that small business owner. You work with successful entrepreneurs in helping them along their journey. We do the same in helping them franchise. So what does a small business, what should they be taking out of this as they start thinking about integrating AI into some of their processes or some of what they’re doing or just their business in general?
Thomas Dunlap (17:48):
Well, they’re going to be sold a lot of things. I’m sure they’ve already had the pitches. Use our AI for customer orders, use our AI for communications on DoorDash. Those are probably good things, but you need to check them and test them and make sure that the product or company that’s selling you the product is good.
(18:05):
For example, we use Read.ai for taking notes in conferences. It just plugs into Zoom or it plugs into everything, Teams, whatever. I don’t know if it plugs into Webex because who uses Webex anymore, but it plugs into anything you use and it generates chapter summaries and a summary of content, not just a transcript, but do outs, what are the follow-up questions? And it’s an AI product and it’s a pretty useful tool, and you’re not using it to provide ultimate answers to anyone, and you’re not relying on it for anything except to take notes so you can focus on the conversation. So that’s a really good use of AI for every entrepreneur.
(18:43):
My advice is, and there’s somebody who’s talking to the litigation funder, but they’re saying that every time they’re on a call now, if there are 40 people on a call, 20 of the people are each person’s note takers, the AI note takers, so they’re getting pretty popular and common in larger business settings. And I recommend every entrepreneur take a look at Read.ai or Otter.ai. There’s a bunch of them out there. They’re really inexpensive and they’re really effective. And it lets you focus on the call without writing stuff down the whole time and it gives you super notes and it supercharges your ability to follow up with people too. So that, I think everybody can use that.
(19:18):
And then do not use it for legal advice or accounting advice or tax advice. But if you want a general idea of a subject matter, like a broad idea like, “Hey, I’m a pizza shop and I want to know how hard is it for me to get in the sandwich space or to,” and the AI will say, “The challenges with getting into the sandwich space will involve changing your supply chain to get,” I mean things you probably would know, but it can summarize it in a neat way such that if you already know the subject, you can read the subject, use it and edit it and make it a nice part of your business plan. Don’t rely on it because it will say things like, “And you will need to make sure that you buy bread from Fred Jones,” like it could say some random crap, so you need to know the subject matter when you’re using AI if you’re writing it, but it can be a useful tool for that.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:04):
One of the things I wanted to ask is if someone’s listening in, say, “Wow, this is really interesting. I’ve got some questions,” how could someone maybe either get in touch with you or your firm?
Thomas Dunlap (20:14):
My firm’s website is dbllawyers.com, so you can visit that. My bio and link to my email is on there, tdunlap@dbllawyers.com. And we are principally IP government contracts and commercial and business stuff, not really divorce PI side, and we’re pretty much national. That’s the best way to get in touch with us.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:33):
Yeah, please.
Thomas Dunlap (20:34):
Listen to my podcast, which you’re going to be on I hope in the next couple weeks. So the Black Letter Podcast, you could just Google it, Spotify, iHeart, whatever. It’s on all the podcast spots. So I’m hoping Tom will join me on my show.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:47):
I’m in.
Thomas Dunlap (20:48):
All right.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:48):
Let’s do this.
Thomas Dunlap (20:48):
Awesome.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:49):
Well, Tom, this is a great time in the show. We make a transition. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Thomas Dunlap (21:00):
First big miss I had I think was I founded a biotech company back in the day, and the first product we came out with was, so I was a co-inventor and a patent holder. I have a master’s in biotech, other part of my life, and the product was to find exogenous human growth hormone in athletes. And we’re like, “This is great. We’re the only ones that can do it.” And we went to US Anti-Doping and World Anti-Doping and we’re like, “We can detect human growth hormone. We’ve solved your problems. You guys say you can’t find it.”
(21:29):
I was working with a product that was built for cancer detection, Precigen, and anyway, and so we could do it and they licensed it from us and then didn’t use it for almost nothing. So it turned out we had to shift gears, and what I learned from that is you really have to understand your market. And you also, and we said this when I was a cavalry officer, is Semper Gumby, like always flexible, but you have to be flexible as a business and be willing to shift gears quickly. And now the company’s been around for 15 years, and its principal products are it does all the COVID wastewater testing for federal buildings, same patent, same nanoparticle. It has huge research contracts with Hopkins and Stanford for biomarker discovery toolkits, serious nanoscience.
(22:10):
So it did well, but we completely changed what we were doing for my original business plan, and I raised three a half million dollars. I went to investors. I did all the little things, and we got venture money, but we had to change what we were doing because the product, instead of saying, “Oh, give up, this doesn’t work.” We’re like, “What else could we do?” So that was my miss, but it worked out, but that’s what I learned from it is just, I mean, be flexible.
Dr. Tom DuFore (22:35):
Fantastic. Well, now let’s look on the other side of a make or to a highlight.
Thomas Dunlap (22:41):
A big highlight for me, and this will sound like a weird one, is when I quit practicing law. So I was a lawyer. I quit. I enlisted in the Army as a private. Then I went to OCS and then became an officer in the Army. I was first an armor officer and then a cavalry officer, but I learned so much about leadership and what’s important and that a lot of the stuff in life is not… Business stuff and money and work is important, but there are bigger things that are more important and the leadership skills leading from the front and all of that stuff that you get from… OCS was not fun, but it was an amazing learning experience.
(23:16):
So I think that was a, I want to call it a highlight. It wasn’t fun to be there, but it was really a highlight of making my career as a business person and an entrepreneur later in life much better, which is a weird, I don’t know if anybody’s going to enlist in the Army now to do that. It’s not a great, easy way to get that information, but it was good for me.
Dr. Tom DuFore (23:36):
Wonderful. Thanks for sharing that. And let’s talk about a multiplier or a force multiplier you’ve used to grow yourself personally or professionally or any businesses you’ve run.
Thomas Dunlap (23:46):
So the best thing I did force multiplier-wise was that I went away from managing my law firm. So lawyers, managing law firms, I think is the biggest waste of time. And anecdotally, I’m on this Managing Partners conference in Virginia, and we run around the first one a few years ago and we’re like, “What do you do,” each lawyer. “What’s your practice?” They’re like, “I practice law 40 hours a week. I manage the firm 40 hours a week.” And when it got to me, I was like, “I practice law 40 hours a week, and I spend the rest of the time doing what I like to do because I have a CEO, a CMO and a CFO who are not lawyers and who are better at it than me because they’re not lawyers. I do law and that’s what my value is.”
(24:21):
So figuring that out and going to a professional managed model, we went from about 20 lawyers to 80 lawyers in the space of five years. But a lot of that had to do with leveraging people who are good at that and not as a lawyer saying, “Well, I’m smart. I went to law school. I can also run a business, do finance and do marketing.” I mean, that’s crazy, crazy talk, in my view, in my view. But that was I think a force multiplier over everything else.
Dr. Tom DuFore (24:48):
Wonderful. Well, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Thomas Dunlap (24:54):
So success means to me if you get up every day and you like what you do, you are successful. I have a lot of aspiring law students or my son’s friends who are going to college like, “I want to be a lawyer and you’re a successful lawyer,” I don’t know. I’m successful because I’m happy. But I always tell them, “Look, figure out law, what you like. If you do what you like, you will just automatically be successful no matter how much money you make.” So that’s my 10 cents. If you love what you do, who cares? I mean, it’s not a job anymore, it’s just living. So that’s what you have to find. And I love IP, for example, so I don’t really have a job in a way.
Dr. Tom DuFore (25:29):
Excellent. Well, and as we bring this to a close, Tom, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Thomas Dunlap (25:36):
Not really. I mean, if we’re going to talk AI, what I want to get across is do not rely on AI’s answers no matter what they are. Double-check it. So if you get an answer from AI, take that, and then go find the statute or go find the law or go find the case. A whole bunch of lawyers, one lawyer in New York just lost his bar license for doing this. A whole bunch of cases he cited in his brief did not exist, and try it. Ask AI to make you, “AI cite five cases for this proposition.” Just make any proposition like people can drive drunk. It will find five cases, make up the names and make up case law and give you an answer, and that’s crazy. But it’s just a good way to demonstrate that it’s useful, but you must have caution. That’s the one thing I really want to get across to everybody. Use AI, do not throw it away because you’re afraid of it because you will lose out in the business world if you do, but be cautious.
Dr. Tom DuFore (26:29):
Tom, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Tom talked about, at least at the time of recording our interview, is that there were laws orienting around the intellectual property and artificial intelligence, at least not federally right now, and asking questions like, can AI get a patent? And he said, the biggest issue right now is, just thinking for example of a copyright, is you can’t copyright something that someone else made, so that someone else or something else in this case would be artificial intelligence.
(27:08):
Takeaway number two is when he talked about patents and he said AI can be used to help create something, but you have to be able to show what was the inventive step taken by the inventor. And so that was a good little nugget and takeaway there.
(27:25):
Takeaway number three is when he closed out our interview, he had a really nice quote when he talked about using artificial intelligence. And his quote was, “You are dealing with a dumb language model that seems wise,” and I thought that was just a nice little nugget that he shared there.
(27:45):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win really ties back to the third takeaway we just talked about. And Tom mentioned don’t rely on AI’s answers that are provided to you no matter what. Always be cautious. He said, “Use artificial intelligence, but be cautious. Use it, but be cautious.” And he said he shared that one lawyer recently has lost his license because he didn’t check and verify what was going on with some results that AI had provided to him.
(28:21):
So I think that’s a great win-win. It’s a tool. It’s something that you can use to help, and it’s obviously a trend that, from my perspective, does not seem to be going away. We can’t, as the saying goes, put the genie back in the bottle here, so it’s out and we’ve got to figure out how to use it and work with it. Use it, but be cautious. I think that’s a great takeaway.
(28:46):
And so that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
