DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 01/28/2026 have been fully considered but are moot in view of the new grounds of rejections.
Claim Objections
As previously stated, claim 8 appears to be missing. It is therefore treated as claim 8 is cancelled. Appropriate correction is required in next action showing claim 8 status.
The acronym A.I. should be spelled out when first used in each independent claimed.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 7, 11-24, and 31-32 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 7 recites the limitation “…part of the generative A.I. prompt requesting a verification score”. It is not clear which generative AI prompt it is referring to as there is no prompt in claim 1. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 11 recites the limitation “…a score visualization that displays the detection score and the verification score in relation to one or more predefined threshold ranges”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. Claims 12-24 are rejected for being dependent on claim 11.
Regarding claim 31, the claim states “generating a verification prompt for processing by a generative artificial intelligence system, the verification prompt comprising: (i) the submitted material, (ii) a request for a response to a verification task associated with the submitted material”. It is not clear how a generative prompt can comprise a request for response to a verification task. A verification task is question asked to the user. So, it is not clear what is being submitted to generative system. It is not clear if question is asked to the user and then the response is sent back to a generative system, if that is the case it needs to clarified in the claims.
Claim 32 is rejected similarly. As claim 32 states : “generating a verification prompt for processing by a generative artificial intelligence system, the verification prompt comprising: (i) the submitted material; and (ii) a request for a response to a verification task associated with the submitted material”. It is not clear how a generative prompt can comprise a request for response to a verification task. A verification task is question asked to the user. So, it is not clear what is being submitted to generative system. It is not clear if question is asked to the user and then the response is sent back to a generative system, if that is the case it needs to clarified in the claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-4, 9-10, 25, and 27 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Connor, Robert (US Patent 11,853,708).
Regarding claim 1, Connor discloses a method for verifying A.I.-generated material, said method comprising the steps of:
receiving a submitted material (col. 6, lines 20-39);
prompting a verification request for at least one submission of a response to at least one of a question or task (col. 18, lines 16-67, col. 19, lines 4-34);
analyzing said response material by referencing against the submitted material for a verification score (col. 18, lines 19-29); and
verifying the authenticity of the submitted material based on the verification score (col. 18, lines 19-29; col. 39, lines 46-54 – “wherein a lower percentage of correct answers on the test indicates a higher probability that the student used AI to generate the assignment”).
Regarding claim 2, Connor discloses wherein the material is submitted digitally by uploading, downloading, or pasting within a text field (col. 6, lines 3-19, col. 6, lines 40-50).
Regarding claim 3, Connor discloses wherein the submitted material is analyzed for semantic (col. 10, lines 14-36) and/or syntactic perplexity.
Regarding claim 4, Connor discloses wherein the perplexity analyzed yields a perplexity score (col. 2, lines 24-29 – such as rarity scores or vocabulary levels; also see; col. 11, lines 6-40).
Regarding claim 9, Connor discloses wherein the verification score below a pre-defined score indicates authenticity (col. 18, lines 19-28).
Regarding claim 10, Connor discloses further comprising the steps of: accessing a historical record of the author's previous submissions (col. 10, lines 55-67); comparing the attributes characteristic of the current submitted material with the historical record (col. 10, lines 55-67, col. 17, lines 45-58); and using the comparison result as an additional metric to verify the authenticity of the submitted material without requiring direct author intervention (col. 10, lines 55-67, col. 16, lines 54-67).
Regarding claim 25, Connor discloses a system for verification of an A.I.-generated material, said system comprising: a processor; a memory element coupled to the processor; a program executable by the processor (col. 22, lines 1-60) to:
receive a submitted material (col. 6, lines 20-39); analyze the received material for attributes characteristic of A.I.-generated material (col. 2, lines 41-67); score the analyzed material (col. 2, lines 41-67); flag the scored material above a pre-defined score (col. 17, lines 28-44 – high rarity score); prompt a verification request for at least one submission of a response to at least one of a question or task (col. 18, lines 16-67, col. 19, lines 4-34); analyze said response by referencing against the flagged material for a score (col. 18, lines 19-29); and verify the authenticity of the submitted material based on the score and by cross-referencing metadata associated with the submitted material, wherein the metadata is at least one of timestamps, source IP addresses, or usage patterns (col. 10, lines 55-67, col. 17, lines 45-58 – “usage patterns” because Connor disclose “infrequency of usage of that word and/or phrase in a corpus of material which has been previously written by a specific person”).
Regarding claim 27, see rejection of claim 1.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim 5 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Connor, Robert (US Patent 11,853,708) in view of Mindner et al. (“Classification of Human- and AI-Generated Texts: Investigating Features for ChatGPT”).
Regarding claim 5, Connor discloses the method of claim 4.
Connor does not disclose wherein the perplexity analysis is passed through a binary classifier for a binary classifier output.
Mindner discloses wherein the perplexity analysis is passed through a binary classifier for a binary classifier output (see abstract; section 5 and table 6 – uses perplexity analysis to pass through a binary classifier such as XGboost, Random Forest and MLP to output whether human or AI generated content).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Connor with the teachings of Mindner in order to have additional capability of determining if content is AI generated by using binary classifier.
Claims 6-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Connor, Robert (US Patent 11,853,708) in view of Mindner et al. (“Classification of Human- and AI-Generated Texts: Investigating Features for ChatGPT”) and in further view of Bhattacharjee et al. (“Fighting Fire with Fire: Can ChatGPT Detect AI-generated Text?”).
Regarding claim 6, Connor discloses the method of claim 5.
Connor does not disclose wherein the perplexity analysis and classifier output forms at least a portion of a generative A.I. prompt requesting a detection score.
Bhattacharjee discloses wherein the perplexity analysis and classifier output forms at least a portion of a generative A.I. prompt requesting a detection score (see abstract; section 3).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Connor in view of Mindner with the teachings of Bhattacharjee in order to leverage AI to detect if text is AI generated or human generated.
Regarding claim 7, Connor discloses the method of claim 1.
Connor does not disclose comprising a sentiment analysis as part of the generative A.I. prompt requesting a verification score.
Bhattacharjee discloses comprising a sentiment analysis as part of the generative A.I. prompt requesting a verification score (see abstract; section 5 – “GPT-4 have shown impressive performance on a variety of NLP tasks [28] such as natural language inference, question-answering, sentiment analysis”; and see fig. 1).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Connor in view of Mindner with the teachings of Bhattacharjee in order to leverage AI to detect if text is AI generated or human generated.
Claims 11-15 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Connor, Robert (US Patent 11,853,708) in view of Weber-Wulff et al. (“Testing of Detection Tools for AI-Generated Text”).
Regarding claim 11, Connor discloses a system for detecting and verifying A.I.-generated material, said system comprising: a processor; a memory element coupled to the processor, a program executable by the processor (col. 22, lines 1-60) to: receive a submitted material (col. 6, lines 20-39); analyze the received material for attributes characteristic A.I.- generated material (col. 2, lines 41-67); score the analyzed material (col. 2, lines 41-67); flag the scored material above a pre-defined score (col. 17, lines 28-44 – high rarity score); prompt a verification request for at least one submission of a response to at least one of a question or task (col. 18, lines 16-67, col. 19, lines 4-34); analyze said response material by referencing against the submitted material for a score (col. 18, lines 19-29);
Connor does not disclose a score visualization that displays the detection score and the verification score in relation to one or more predefined threshold ranges; and a verification status representing an authenticity classification determined based on whether the detection score and the verification score satisfy corresponding threshold criteria, enabling users to -review the visually presented outputs and selectively override the system's authenticity determination.
Weber-Wulff discloses a score visualization that displays the detection score and the verification score in relation to one or more predefined threshold ranges (see fig. 12 in page 28 and table 5 and 6 for ranges); and a verification status representing an authenticity classification determined based on whether the detection score and the verification score satisfy corresponding threshold criteria (see section 4.4, pages 13-14), enabling users to review the visually presented outputs and selectively override the system's authenticity determination (see page 29).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Connor with the teachings of Weber-Wulff in order to visually see what percentage of the document is judged to be AI generated and makes changes accordingly.
Regarding claim 12, Connor discloses wherein the material is submitted digitally by uploading, downloading, or pasting within a text field (col. 6, lines 3-19, col. 6, lines 40-50).
Regarding claim 13, Connor discloses wherein the submitted material is analyzed for semantic (col. 10, lines 14-36) and/or syntactic perplexity.
Regarding claim 14, Connor discloses wherein the perplexity analyzed yields a perplexity score (col. 2, lines 24-29 – such as rarity scores or vocabulary levels; also see; col. 11, lines 6-40).
Regarding claim 15, Connor discloses wherein the perplexity score above a pre-defined score yields a flagged material (col. 2, lines 24-29 – such as rarity scores or vocabulary levels; also see; col. 11, lines 6-40).
Regarding claim 20, see rejection of claim 11.
Claim 16 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Connor, Robert (US Patent 11,853,708) in view of Weber-Wulff et al. (“Testing of Detection Tools for AI-Generated Text”) in view of Mindner et al. (“Classification of Human- and AI-Generated Texts: Investigating Features for ChatGPT”).
Regarding claim 16, Connor discloses the system of claim 15.
Connor does not disclose wherein the perplexity analysis is passed through a binary classifier for a binary classifier output.
Mindner discloses wherein the perplexity analysis is passed through a binary classifier for a binary classifier output (see abstract; section 5 and table 6 – uses perplexity analysis to pass through a binary classifier such as XGboost, Random Forest and MLP to output whether human or AI generated content).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Connor in view of Weber-Wulff with the teachings of Mindner in order to have additional capability of determining if content is AI generated by using binary classifier.
Claims 17-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Connor, Robert (US Patent 11,853,708) in view of Weber-Wulff et al. (“Testing of Detection Tools for AI-Generated Text”) and in view of Mindner et al. (“Classification of Human- and AI-Generated Texts: Investigating Features for ChatGPT”) and in further view of Bhattacharjee et al. (“Fighting Fire with Fire: Can ChatGPT Detect AI-generated Text?”).
Regarding claim 17, Connor and Weber-Wulff discloses the system of claim 16.
Connor does not disclose wherein the perplexity analysis and classifier output forms at least a portion of a generative A.I. prompt requesting a verification score.
Bhattacharjee discloses wherein the perplexity analysis and classifier output forms at least a portion of a generative A.I. prompt requesting a verification score (see abstract; section 3).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Connor in view of Mindner with the teachings of Bhattacharjee in order to leverage AI to detect if text is AI generated or human generated.
Regarding claim 18, Bhattacharjee discloses comprising a sentiment analysis as part of the generative A.I. prompt requesting a verification score (see abstract; section 5 – “GPT-4 have shown impressive performance on a variety of NLP tasks [28] such as natural language inference, question-answering, sentiment analysis”; and see fig. 1).
Regarding claim 19, Connor discloses wherein the verification score below a pre-defined score indicates authenticity (col. 18, lines 19-28).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 28 and dependent claim 30 is indicated as allowable. Claims 21-24 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims and fixing the 35 USC 112 rejection.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NAFIZ E HOQUE whose telephone number is (571)270-1811. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8-5.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Ahmad Matar can be reached at (571)272-7488. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/NAFIZ E HOQUE/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2693
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