Granting limited legal personality to AI spills over and leads to additional conferral of rights
Abbot and Sarch 19 Ryan Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences, University of Surrey School of Law and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles. Alex Sarch, Reader (Associate Professor) in Legal Philosophy, University of Surrey School of Law
Ryan Abbott and Alex Sarch, Punishing Artificial Intelligence: Legal Fiction or Science Fiction, 2019, https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/53/1/articles/files/53-1_Abbott_Sarch.pdf
Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, conferring legal personality on AI may lead to rights creep, or the tendency for an increasing number of rights to arise over time.229 Even if AIs are given few or no rights initially when they are first granted legal personhood, they may gradually acquire rights as time progresses. Granting legal personhood to AI may thus be an important step down a slippery slope. In a 1933 Supreme Court opinion, for instance, Justice Brandeis warned about rights creep, and argued that granting corporations an excess of rights could allow them to dominate the State.230 Eighty years after that decision, Justice Brandeis’ concerns were prescient in light of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which significantly expanded the rights extended to corporations.231 Such rights, for corporations and AI, can restrict valuable human activities and freedoms.