The legal status of AI systems in the European Union: personhood, thinghood or otherwise?
(2022) Séminaire de l’Ecole doctorale en Sciences Juridiques — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique (13.May.2022)
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Mocanu, Diana 
- Abstract
- Is legal personhood just thinghood plus rights? The current legal status of animals seems to contradict this, since they are currently attributed some rights (at least correlative, to bodily integrity and protection from harm) without being considered legal persons. If this were a matter of threshold, the question would then become how many rights or which ones legally distinguish a thing from a person and make up legal personhood. Rebus sic stantibus, either our definition of legal personhood needs to change from the all-or-nothing “ability to hold rights and be subject to obligations” to accommodate this fact (of animals holding some rights without being legal persons), or we could instead attribute sui generis legal status to animals. We could do that more generally in relation to all non-humans that can be thought of as disrupting the traditional person-thing dichotomy, treating them as neither things, nor persons in the law, but as their own legal category, subject to some rights, but not to others. AI systems are a particularly topical range of non-humans in current legal debates. My contribution will attempt to disambiguate the notion (i.e. “AI systems”) without sliding too much into the technical, but highlighting overlaps with robots and the general potential for regulatory confusion. It will do so in order to inform an analysis of the gradual change of tune between the EU Parliament’s 2017 Resolution proposing e-personhood for “at least the most sophisticated robots” and the latest developments, most notably the AI Act proposal currently being amended by the EU Parliament, as well as the European product liability framework. De lege ferenda, it will examine the possibility of sui generis legal status for AI systems in the EU, given the little leeway of its current “future-proof” approach.
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Citations
Mocanu, D. (2022). The legal status of AI systems in the European Union: personhood, thinghood or otherwise? Séminaire de l’Ecole doctorale en Sciences Juridiques, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/102982