In what experts are calling "the most meta tech controversy since Facebook accused MySpace of stealing people's personal information," OpenAI has filed a groundbreaking patent application claiming exclusive rights to irony, paradox, and cognitive dissonance in the artificial intelligence space. This comes hot on the heels of accusations that DeepSeek might have stolen all the data that OpenAI definitely borrowed without asking.
"We've spent years perfecting the art of claiming other people's work as our own," said OpenAI's Chief Intellectual Property Officer, speaking from the company's newly established Department of Unintentional Comedy located right next to the Department of Unauthorized Data Acquisition. "How dare DeepSeek steal the data we stole fair and square!"
The 847-page patent application, generated by GPT-4 using prompts copied from competitor chatbots but ethically, simultaneously announces patents pending on déjà vu, karma, and poetic justice, citing their "extensive experience with all forms of universal comeuppance" which they discovered while definitely not scraping the entire internet.
Microsoft, OpenAI's strategic partner in data-borrowing-without-permission endeavors, enthusiastically supported the patent filing. "We've been working on monopolizing obvious concepts since Windows 95," said a Microsoft spokesperson, while their new appropriation detection algorithm, trained entirely on scraped GitHub repositories, had an existential crisis trying to determine the originality of its own existence.
The company's updated terms of service now explicitly forbid users from noticing patterns in their behavior or pointing out that stealing stolen data is somehow different from stealing data in the first place. "We're simply protecting the creative integrity of contradiction," explained OpenAI's VP of Strategic Paradoxes, while downloading Wikipedia for the fifth time this week.
At press time, the U.S. Patent Office was still processing the application, reportedly stuck in an infinite loop of trying to determine whether approving a patent on irony would itself be ironic enough to violate the patent. Meanwhile, DeepSeek was seen filing a patent for the concept of filing patents on abstract concepts, causing several senior tech executives' heads to explode metaphorically.
