I'm waiting for a future where we can ask a "blank" AI to come up with trivial solutions to new problems, so that we can just invalidate such stupid patents. If the AI can invent it, it is not worthy of a patent.
Simple != trivial. The art is in designing a high quality experience, not in solving a programming problem.
Look and feel is a very real and valuable thing in the marketplace. The big differentiator between Apple and everyone else is that Apple pays attention to - or used to pay attention to, anyway - the user experience,
The code behind the experience was always secondary to that. Users don't care about it, and they're completely fine with not caring.
I agree that there are limits, especially when there are patents on rounded corners or specific English words.
But generally if there's innovation in the user experience on a screen it's potentially patentable, even if the code behind it is trivially simple.
AIs have no concept of user experience, so it's unlikely you'd get much of marketable value out of one.
It's more that AI can't be taught aesthetics since for most people it's a "I know it when I see it" sort of thing. Very few people can turn that into a talent like Scott Forestall. We're probably at least a century away before we can get an AI to work at that level of abstraction.
I could bang out an AI that files patent applications right now. All I have to do is use neural networks on existing computer patents and it would probably sound impressive to the patent office.
