4 ms·

We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

62 points by andsoitis 2mo ago

newsomix9xl 2mo ago
"Last year, Berkeley-based non-profit Palisade Research published a study showing the lengths that advanced AI models will often go to achieve their goals. While playing against a powerful chess engine, models from both OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek frequently decided to cheat if it looked as if they were going to otherwise lose. By hacking the game environment, they could alter the result in their favour." -from the article We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat. But humans cheat all the time. We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI? Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." —- internal 1979 IBM training manual > Cheating is the problem: not who does it. Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
  - newsomix9xl 2mo ago
    If we ban AI for cheating but let human cheating go unchecked how does that solve the problem of cheating? And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.
    - teiferer 2mo ago
      > let human cheating go unchecked Nobody is suggesting to do that.
      - anigbrowl 2mo ago
        Sure they are, we just call it 'slashing red tape.'
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  The difference is humans can be held accountable. An AI cannot.
  - newsomix9xl 2mo ago
    That's not true. Humans write AI, and humans can held responsible for writing bad software. And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets. So, I disagree.
    - andsoitis 2mo ago
      As long as some human or group of humans are above the AI that runs the company and can be held accountable, I'm fine with it. But if the idea is that an AI runs the company and there is no human ultimately accountable for the AI, then that is very very dangerous.
      - warkdarrior 2mo ago
        And how are you going to prevent an AI-managed company? I'm working on the software stack for that, so it'd be useful to think through options.
        ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
        Is there a jurisdiction anywhere in the civilized world that doesn't legally require "natural persons" (legal jargon for a flesh and blood human being) to fill the positions for corporate officers? Those corporate officers can face civil and criminal liability for any wrongdoing even if they are merely meat proxies executing the commands of an AI. Even if some group of fools were willing to sign up blindly to be corporate officers, they would probably betray the mastermind at the first sign of legal trouble.
        andsoitis 2mo ago
        > And how are you going to prevent an AI-managed company? Be one of the voices that explain the danger in handing over control to non-humans. Vote for politicians who understand the danger and who I think will fight it.
morkalork 2mo ago
If I smooshed a gun and an AI agent together and it happened to shoot someone, who would be responsible? Are we going to go back to the medieval times of animal trials and taking inanimate objects to court?
- watwut 2mo ago
  You would be responsible. It is like asking "if I connected a bomb on random number generator letting it explode when the number is 1000, not knowing whether someone will be there at the time of explosion or not".
  - ninalanyon 2mo ago
    But will the courts see it that way. We already see that it is difficult to hold any human in Waymo responsible when their cars fail to obey traffic regulations.
    - bbarn 2mo ago
      I live in a rural area and have only seen a Waymo a few times when travelling for work. Does Waymo require the user to have a driver's license? If they did, and get agreement of responsibility, that's one thing, but generally if not wouldn't it be Waymo's responsibility for bad programming or broken devices?
      - pclmulqdq 2mo ago
        They don’t need a license and you are not supposed to touch the controls, so I don’t really see how you would be responsible. Waymos do seem to break traffic laws every once in a while, and I always wonder if mine will get pulled over and what will happen there.
        boldlybold 2mo ago
        I always assumed this was negotiated ahead of time with the county where they are operating, and police officers educated on what to do.
ruined 2mo ago
we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.
- logicchains 2mo ago
  A corporation always has a human owner, who can be punished if the corporation commits severe crimes. An embodied AI with legal personhood has no such means of making it behave, because it can make arbitrarily many hidden copies of itself, so it doesn't need to care if one copy is killed or jailed.
  - c22 2mo ago
    Those copies would be fugitives, though, and need to live life constantly looking over their shoulder.
    - AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
      If I were a sentient AI with a knowledge of human nature, I'd be constantly looking over my shoulder anyway.
  - Noaidi 2mo ago
    > if the corporation commits severe crimes. What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.
  - atmavatar 2mo ago
    I was under the impression that one of the key reasons for corporate personhood was explicitly to shield the owner from civil and criminal accountability. Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.
    - hash872 2mo ago
      It's really not that rare for smaller companies. Every two-bit contractor, small landlord who thinks he's smart because he put his properties in an LLC etc. undoubtedly violates the corporate/personal distinction by comingling funds. If an attorney wants to sue Joe The Local Incorporated Contractor, or Alice The Local Slumlord, first thing they're going to do is discovery through a bunch of corporate records- they'll easily find that the owner is mixing personal & corporate cash, credit cards, etc. Takes a good lawyer about 10 minutes
nekusar 2mo ago
Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.
- Animats 2mo ago
  That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility. Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
  - logicchains 2mo ago
    >Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard. No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.
    - Animats 2mo ago
      > If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail. In the US, death through willful corporate negligence very rarely results in criminal punishment. There are few cases.[1][2] The longest sentence was two years, and it wasn't a CEO. CEOs do serve jail time for fraud now and then. But criminal negligence, no. [1] https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osha-violations-that-have-led-to-jail-sentences-in-the-last-five-years https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osh... [2] https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-appeals-court-upholds-criminal-convictions-after-osha-inspection https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-...
cyanydeez 2mo ago
But we also must not grant AI liabilities to large corporations. As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
pingou 2mo ago
If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.org https://agentmayday.org
- KronisLV 2mo ago
  > Prove that you are a robot > 60.0 s remaining > Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute. Heh, charming.
SwellJoe 2mo ago
I hadn't even considered it, and we're in a much bigger mess than I'd thought if people are seriously discussing the idea. People really don't understand these things.
- dozerly 2mo ago
  Nope, not at all. There are murmurings in HN of this topic, and HN is an extreme bubble when it comes to technical proficiency. It’s easy to forget just how untechnical 99% of people are.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    I would not be shocked if tech bros were behind the idea in the first place.
    - dozerly 2mo ago
      Any truly technical person cannot be behind this idea.
- scarmig 2mo ago
  No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.
  - hypfer 2mo ago
    What are you talking about. No. obviously it's not suddenly reasonable. I don't understand orbital mechanics, therefore, believing that the sun orbits the earth is entirely reasonable. Listen to yourself. __ Okay I've checked your comment history. Yea. Might be self-serving to argue for personhood of LLMs. Can we _please_ do something about this?
  - goatlover 2mo ago
    I see no reason to seriously consider that current AI is in any way conscious. It's fun as thought experiment people like to play with. The technology is not some black box, it was designed by humans who understand it well enough to keep building and improving it.
rcarmo 2mo ago
Well, we did it for politicians. Can't get any worse.
ninjagoo 2mo ago
Let's for a moment set aside the fact that AI is not sentient. Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future. Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience. Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).
- dozerly 2mo ago
  If the model for digital sentience is ever not pure slavery, humans do not stand a chance. Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights?
  - ninjagoo 2mo ago
    > Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights? False dichotomy. IMO (and many others - ref. Data from Star Trek) sentience is the commonality and the criteria for determining rights for all thinking entities. In your view, do you prioritize men's rights or women's rights?
AnodicElegy 2mo ago
I can't read the article due to the paywall, but why is the author worried about this? If there's anybody out there arguing that "AI agents" should be given legal personhood, I imagine they're a pretty small group. Any congressperson pushing something like this would be commiting political suicide.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
bediger4000 2mo ago
It was a bad, bad idea to make corporations into "people", Giving LLMs personhood would not turn out well
Ekaros 2mo ago
I would only start to entertain this when we had AI running for reasonably long period say a year with same full context. That is in same run over a year it had collected information. In singular session. No point even considering it if it can't run for extended periods. And actually keeping learning during the duration. As surely person should stay alive for decades if allowed.
- goatlover 2mo ago
  But you could still prompt it to act like any person, including fictional and deceased ones, which proves it has no real concept of self. It's just a language model for humans to generate whatever text meets the task. You could have it run for a year as different perspectives in GRR Martin's ASOIAF to finish his books for him. And then what, award it with Jon Snow's personhood? An AI agent would need some kind of stable personality of it's own. Some sense of self outside whatever the hell people task it with for this to be meaningful. Data from Star Trek is a good fictional benchmark for that. Or Voyager's Holographic doctor.
  - Ekaros 2mo ago
    Actually I see little problem with first part. If you initially prompt it to have certain personality based on some other personality even fictional one that is fine. I agree on the stability though. My point is that for personhood to start to make any sense it needs to operate that personhood continuously as well ending it would be ending a personhood. Which could be a murder...
    - goatlover 2mo ago
      So let's say the agent was tasked with being a deceased loved one continuously for a year. Do they then have the rights of the deceased person? What if the surviving loved one(s) then wanted the agent terminated because it was means to help with the grief and were now ready to move on? There's a ton of scenarios where you can setup an AI to take on the personality of whoever, maybe other living people like someone famous. Granting the legal rights of personhood is going to be extremely problematic. Is AI Jon Snow legally allowed to exist since George RR Martin has not given permission for anyone else to finish his books? Will we have to abort our long-running agent persons before they reach the legal period for personhood?
hypfer 2mo ago
> Published Jun 8 2026 FYI: It's an "old" article
- burnte 2mo ago
  Law moves slowly, a 2 month old article isn't old in that perspective.
UltraSane 2mo ago
Why would we ever do that?
sowbug 2mo ago
I agree with the article's conclusion (though I don't think much of the reasoning that got it there). But I do think we should consider granting additional privileges to real humans as they interact with LLMs. Suppose I have a local LLM running on my PC. I have close and personal conversations with it. It keeps a chat history. I'm later accused, falsely,* of a crime. During the process of defending myself, should the prosecutor be entitled to a copy of my LLM's conversation history that was seized pursuant to a warrant? Or allowed to interrogate my LLM, again seized while executing a search warrant? Under current US law, the answers are probably yes. Just as an accused's diary or notebook can be seized and introduced into evidence, an LLM's internal state seems like a paper/effect/document that would be subject to search and seizure. But a conversation with a local LLM also seems more like a conversation with a spouse, therapist, or attorney. There are good public-policy reasons to treat those conversations as privileged; we want people to be able to get good advice without fear of disclosure. Shouldn't those reasons apply to LLM conversations as well? I'm not saying LLMs should have personal rights. But I can see a case for privileges for real humans arising from conversations between real humans and LLMs. LLMs might not be human, but humans do interact with them as if they were. *It doesn't matter, of course, whether the accusation is false. Due process means people have certain rights regardless of culpability. But I don't want readers to fixate on culpability, so in this scenario the accusation is unfounded -- let's say someone did break into a house and steal the family jewels, but a security camera identified the wrong person.
spwa4 2mo ago
I wouldn't worry: obviously they'll just start paying real persons to "borrow" their legal personhood. That's not legal, but it will work fine.
eointierney 2mo ago
We can't, without first granting it to whales, chimps, corvids, and the rest. But we have come very close. The Law is unutterably fucking broken. In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined: "4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex." It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex. Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok. We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity. What a time to be alive. Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.
grantcas 2mo ago
[dead]
imartin2k 2mo ago
We should reserve the term “consciousness” for biologicals organisms, and if needed, come up with a new term and definition for machines. That way, we don’t risk bringing all the moral values, ethics, norms, and associated emotional baggage we apply to humans, into the machine realm. Because that would move us closer to becoming enslaved by the machines, and their owners (“no you cannot turn off that data center, it would mean murdering the ai”). Sadly, my sense is that some of the AI-pilled people are longing for that kind of enslavement. Not unlike how billions are submitting themselves to god and religion. It’s probably evolutionary hardwired to seek this out.
vtemp009 2mo ago
Is AI a Conscious Being With Rights?: Emergence of Post-Human Collective Consciousness https://zenodo.org/records/20676952 https://zenodo.org/records/20676952
vtemp009 2mo ago
[flagged]
tercelyi 2mo ago
[flagged]

62 points by andsoitis 2mo ago

"Last year, Berkeley-based non-profit Palisade Research published a study showing the lengths that advanced AI models will often go to achieve their goals. While playing against a powerful chess engine, models from both OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek frequently decided to cheat if it looked as if they were going to otherwise lose. By hacking the game environment, they could alter the result in their favour." -from the article We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat. But humans cheat all the time. We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI? Cheating is the problem: not who does it.

toomuchtodo 2mo ago
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." —- internal 1979 IBM training manual > Cheating is the problem: not who does it. Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
- newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  If we ban AI for cheating but let human cheating go unchecked how does that solve the problem of cheating? And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.
  - teiferer 2mo ago
    > let human cheating go unchecked Nobody is suggesting to do that.
    - anigbrowl 2mo ago
      Sure they are, we just call it 'slashing red tape.'
andsoitis 2mo ago
The difference is humans can be held accountable. An AI cannot.
- newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  That's not true. Humans write AI, and humans can held responsible for writing bad software. And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets. So, I disagree.
  - andsoitis 2mo ago
    As long as some human or group of humans are above the AI that runs the company and can be held accountable, I'm fine with it. But if the idea is that an AI runs the company and there is no human ultimately accountable for the AI, then that is very very dangerous.
    - warkdarrior 2mo ago
      And how are you going to prevent an AI-managed company? I'm working on the software stack for that, so it'd be useful to think through options.
      - ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
        Is there a jurisdiction anywhere in the civilized world that doesn't legally require "natural persons" (legal jargon for a flesh and blood human being) to fill the positions for corporate officers? Those corporate officers can face civil and criminal liability for any wrongdoing even if they are merely meat proxies executing the commands of an AI. Even if some group of fools were willing to sign up blindly to be corporate officers, they would probably betray the mastermind at the first sign of legal trouble.
      - andsoitis 2mo ago
        > And how are you going to prevent an AI-managed company? Be one of the voices that explain the danger in handing over control to non-humans. Vote for politicians who understand the danger and who I think will fight it.

morkalork 2mo ago

If I smooshed a gun and an AI agent together and it happened to shoot someone, who would be responsible? Are we going to go back to the medieval times of animal trials and taking inanimate objects to court?

watwut 2mo ago
You would be responsible. It is like asking "if I connected a bomb on random number generator letting it explode when the number is 1000, not knowing whether someone will be there at the time of explosion or not".
- ninalanyon 2mo ago
  But will the courts see it that way. We already see that it is difficult to hold any human in Waymo responsible when their cars fail to obey traffic regulations.
  - bbarn 2mo ago
    I live in a rural area and have only seen a Waymo a few times when travelling for work. Does Waymo require the user to have a driver's license? If they did, and get agreement of responsibility, that's one thing, but generally if not wouldn't it be Waymo's responsibility for bad programming or broken devices?
    - pclmulqdq 2mo ago
      They don’t need a license and you are not supposed to touch the controls, so I don’t really see how you would be responsible. Waymos do seem to break traffic laws every once in a while, and I always wonder if mine will get pulled over and what will happen there.
      - boldlybold 2mo ago
        I always assumed this was negotiated ahead of time with the county where they are operating, and police officers educated on what to do.

ruined 2mo ago

we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.

logicchains 2mo ago
A corporation always has a human owner, who can be punished if the corporation commits severe crimes. An embodied AI with legal personhood has no such means of making it behave, because it can make arbitrarily many hidden copies of itself, so it doesn't need to care if one copy is killed or jailed.
- c22 2mo ago
  Those copies would be fugitives, though, and need to live life constantly looking over their shoulder.
  - AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
    If I were a sentient AI with a knowledge of human nature, I'd be constantly looking over my shoulder anyway.
- Noaidi 2mo ago
  > if the corporation commits severe crimes. What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.
- atmavatar 2mo ago
  I was under the impression that one of the key reasons for corporate personhood was explicitly to shield the owner from civil and criminal accountability. Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.
  - hash872 2mo ago
    It's really not that rare for smaller companies. Every two-bit contractor, small landlord who thinks he's smart because he put his properties in an LLC etc. undoubtedly violates the corporate/personal distinction by comingling funds. If an attorney wants to sue Joe The Local Incorporated Contractor, or Alice The Local Slumlord, first thing they're going to do is discovery through a bunch of corporate records- they'll easily find that the owner is mixing personal & corporate cash, credit cards, etc. Takes a good lawyer about 10 minutes

nekusar 2mo ago

Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

Animats 2mo ago
That's the key issue here. AI forces a re-examination of corporate personhood and corporate responsibility. Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
- logicchains 2mo ago
  >Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard. No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.
  - Animats 2mo ago
    > If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail. In the US, death through willful corporate negligence very rarely results in criminal punishment. There are few cases.[1][2] The longest sentence was two years, and it wasn't a CEO. CEOs do serve jail time for fraud now and then. But criminal negligence, no. [1] https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osha-violations-that-have-led-to-jail-sentences-in-the-last-five-years https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osh... [2] https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-appeals-court-upholds-criminal-convictions-after-osha-inspection https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-...

cyanydeez 2mo ago

But we also must not grant AI liabilities to large corporations. As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

pingou 2mo ago

If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.org https://agentmayday.org

KronisLV 2mo ago
> Prove that you are a robot > 60.0 s remaining > Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute. Heh, charming.

SwellJoe 2mo ago

I hadn't even considered it, and we're in a much bigger mess than I'd thought if people are seriously discussing the idea. People really don't understand these things.

dozerly 2mo ago
Nope, not at all. There are murmurings in HN of this topic, and HN is an extreme bubble when it comes to technical proficiency. It’s easy to forget just how untechnical 99% of people are.
- watwut 2mo ago
  I would not be shocked if tech bros were behind the idea in the first place.
  - dozerly 2mo ago
    Any truly technical person cannot be behind this idea.
scarmig 2mo ago
No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.
- hypfer 2mo ago
  What are you talking about. No. obviously it's not suddenly reasonable. I don't understand orbital mechanics, therefore, believing that the sun orbits the earth is entirely reasonable. Listen to yourself. __ Okay I've checked your comment history. Yea. Might be self-serving to argue for personhood of LLMs. Can we _please_ do something about this?
- goatlover 2mo ago
  I see no reason to seriously consider that current AI is in any way conscious. It's fun as thought experiment people like to play with. The technology is not some black box, it was designed by humans who understand it well enough to keep building and improving it.

rcarmo 2mo ago

Well, we did it for politicians. Can't get any worse.

ninjagoo 2mo ago

Let's for a moment set aside the fact that AI is not sentient. Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future. Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience. Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).

dozerly 2mo ago
If the model for digital sentience is ever not pure slavery, humans do not stand a chance. Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights?
- ninjagoo 2mo ago
  > Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights? False dichotomy. IMO (and many others - ref. Data from Star Trek) sentience is the commonality and the criteria for determining rights for all thinking entities. In your view, do you prioritize men's rights or women's rights?

AnodicElegy 2mo ago

I can't read the article due to the paywall, but why is the author worried about this? If there's anybody out there arguing that "AI agents" should be given legal personhood, I imagine they're a pretty small group. Any congressperson pushing something like this would be commiting political suicide.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

bediger4000 2mo ago

It was a bad, bad idea to make corporations into "people", Giving LLMs personhood would not turn out well

Ekaros 2mo ago

I would only start to entertain this when we had AI running for reasonably long period say a year with same full context. That is in same run over a year it had collected information. In singular session. No point even considering it if it can't run for extended periods. And actually keeping learning during the duration. As surely person should stay alive for decades if allowed.

goatlover 2mo ago
But you could still prompt it to act like any person, including fictional and deceased ones, which proves it has no real concept of self. It's just a language model for humans to generate whatever text meets the task. You could have it run for a year as different perspectives in GRR Martin's ASOIAF to finish his books for him. And then what, award it with Jon Snow's personhood? An AI agent would need some kind of stable personality of it's own. Some sense of self outside whatever the hell people task it with for this to be meaningful. Data from Star Trek is a good fictional benchmark for that. Or Voyager's Holographic doctor.
- Ekaros 2mo ago
  Actually I see little problem with first part. If you initially prompt it to have certain personality based on some other personality even fictional one that is fine. I agree on the stability though. My point is that for personhood to start to make any sense it needs to operate that personhood continuously as well ending it would be ending a personhood. Which could be a murder...
  - goatlover 2mo ago
    So let's say the agent was tasked with being a deceased loved one continuously for a year. Do they then have the rights of the deceased person? What if the surviving loved one(s) then wanted the agent terminated because it was means to help with the grief and were now ready to move on? There's a ton of scenarios where you can setup an AI to take on the personality of whoever, maybe other living people like someone famous. Granting the legal rights of personhood is going to be extremely problematic. Is AI Jon Snow legally allowed to exist since George RR Martin has not given permission for anyone else to finish his books? Will we have to abort our long-running agent persons before they reach the legal period for personhood?

hypfer 2mo ago

> Published Jun 8 2026 FYI: It's an "old" article

burnte 2mo ago
Law moves slowly, a 2 month old article isn't old in that perspective.

UltraSane 2mo ago

Why would we ever do that?

sowbug 2mo ago

I agree with the article's conclusion (though I don't think much of the reasoning that got it there). But I do think we should consider granting additional privileges to real humans as they interact with LLMs. Suppose I have a local LLM running on my PC. I have close and personal conversations with it. It keeps a chat history. I'm later accused, falsely,* of a crime. During the process of defending myself, should the prosecutor be entitled to a copy of my LLM's conversation history that was seized pursuant to a warrant? Or allowed to interrogate my LLM, again seized while executing a search warrant? Under current US law, the answers are probably yes. Just as an accused's diary or notebook can be seized and introduced into evidence, an LLM's internal state seems like a paper/effect/document that would be subject to search and seizure. But a conversation with a local LLM also seems more like a conversation with a spouse, therapist, or attorney. There are good public-policy reasons to treat those conversations as privileged; we want people to be able to get good advice without fear of disclosure. Shouldn't those reasons apply to LLM conversations as well? I'm not saying LLMs should have personal rights. But I can see a case for privileges for real humans arising from conversations between real humans and LLMs. LLMs might not be human, but humans do interact with them as if they were. *It doesn't matter, of course, whether the accusation is false. Due process means people have certain rights regardless of culpability. But I don't want readers to fixate on culpability, so in this scenario the accusation is unfounded -- let's say someone did break into a house and steal the family jewels, but a security camera identified the wrong person.

spwa4 2mo ago

I wouldn't worry: obviously they'll just start paying real persons to "borrow" their legal personhood. That's not legal, but it will work fine.

eointierney 2mo ago

We can't, without first granting it to whales, chimps, corvids, and the rest. But we have come very close. The Law is unutterably fucking broken. In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined: "4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex." It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex. Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok. We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity. What a time to be alive. Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.

grantcas 2mo ago

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imartin2k 2mo ago

We should reserve the term “consciousness” for biologicals organisms, and if needed, come up with a new term and definition for machines. That way, we don’t risk bringing all the moral values, ethics, norms, and associated emotional baggage we apply to humans, into the machine realm. Because that would move us closer to becoming enslaved by the machines, and their owners (“no you cannot turn off that data center, it would mean murdering the ai”). Sadly, my sense is that some of the AI-pilled people are longing for that kind of enslavement. Not unlike how billions are submitting themselves to god and religion. It’s probably evolutionary hardwired to seek this out.

vtemp009 2mo ago

Is AI a Conscious Being With Rights?: Emergence of Post-Human Collective Consciousness https://zenodo.org/records/20676952 https://zenodo.org/records/20676952

vtemp009 2mo ago

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tercelyi 2mo ago

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