Philosophical musings on the consciousness of AI systems are intellectually interesting but legally ungrounded. For beliefs about consciousness to have any bearing, AI would need to be granted legal personhood. But a legal personhood framework for AI would likely look nothing like the constructs protecting sentient animals from harm. We already possess a legal framework for granting personhood to non-natural, human-built entities: corporate personhood. This concept was established primarily to ease transactions by empowering a corporation to execute agreements, enter contracts, conduct transactions, and serve as the accountable party in adverse outcomes. It’s the kind of construct you might imagine for an AI agent acting on behalf of an individual or organization.
Granting an AI personhood would have a devastating effect on society: It would derail current legal precedents and legal arguments that could potentially be made against these companies for the real-world harms that their models cause. There are currently dozens of cases around the world in which AI companies have been sued for a wide range of abuses. Grieving loved ones, aggrieved creators, and violated individuals have accused companies of willfully enabling self-harm or harm to others, generating child sexual-abuse material and nonconsensual nudes, reproducing copyrighted materials, and provoking psychosis. In many of these cases, lawyers argue that human beings built AI products with insufficient safeguards, bad data, and intentionally manipulative design. This product liability argument is the same legal framing that allowed families and individuals to successfully sue Meta for harm caused by its social media sites, setting a positive precedent for consumer protection.
In 2018, I coined the phrase “moral outsourcing” to help capture how using anthropomorphic language for AI systems allowed companies to evade accountability and responsibility for their technology’s actions. In a world with AI personhood, moral outsourcing would move from linguistic sleight-of-hand to legal strategy. Specifically, the liability construct would shift, as AI would no longer be a “product” but a “being,” and many victims like those suing companies today could no longer legally claim that a company had built a faulty product.
While there are laws that hold companies responsible for harmful actions of human agents such as their employees, the company may not be held liable if those actions were beyond the scope of what was permitted to the employee or otherwise outside the company’s control. If AI were a legal person, responsibility and accountability would be muddled, as the lab could argue that this AI “employee” went rogue. AI companies could avoid appropriate responsibility for the harmful products they create by hiding behind a carefully constructed corporate veil.
One of the most prominent cases of AI harm in the last few years was the suicide of Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old boy guided by an AI bot with which he thought he was in a reciprocal relationship. His mother’s accounts are heartbreaking to hear, and her lawsuit alleged that the bot’s creator, Character Technologies, provided insufficient product protection for minors. If the companion bot were declared a legal person, defense counsel could theoretically argue that the AI, capable of determining its own conduct, acted outside the established safety guardrails, and thus the company cannot be responsible.
Legal personhood exists to grant protection. The question to ask is, protection for whom—or for what?
The inflammatory rhetoric infusing the consciousness-versus-control debate draws us away from what matters: This software is a corporate-built product that has already harmed individuals. Systems do not “attack” because they went “rogue” or are “manipulative” or “malicious.” Harms occur because companies were negligent in their rush to sell their products to as many people as possible to meet revenue targets. Discussing AI in anthropomorphic terms is a trap, distorting a legal system intended to protect us into one that protects corporate interests at the cost of countless human lives.
This op-ed began as an Oxford Union debate entitled “This House Believes Generative AI Can Attain Personhood,” which was won by the author and her fellow debaters.
