16. Heather Alexander: AI Rights and Legal Personhood

thing we should probably try to clarify is the concept of personhood.

And you draw a distinction between legal personhood like corporations have and legal identity that humans have.

What's the importance of that distinction and how will it bear on treatment of future AI systems?

So I think it's really important to distinguish between two types of things that states can do with persons.

The first is we have this concept of recognizing something under the law.

So legal identity is a really good example of where we recognize something.

So there's a pre-existing fact about the world, like the fact that you've been born.

That's not something that the government decides.

And then the government recognizes your birth and your, you know, sort of entitlements of just being a human by giving you a birth certificate.

And that's your legal identity.

Yes, I have been born.

I have certain rights because I've been born.

And then we have this other thing that states do, which is actually granting birth So citizenship is a good example of granting or, you know, it could even be as minor as, you know, granting a driver's license.

And because the state has granted you your citizenship, the state can also take it away.

The state could take your driver's license away, but the state can't take the fact of your birth away.

I mean, it can murder you.

if it wants to get rid of you, but it can't take away your personhood by withdrawing your citizenship.

So this is an important distinction.

And for AI systems, corporate personality is granted by the state.

So corporations are, in essence, kind of created by this bureaucratic process, and then they can be taken away by a bureaucratic process.

So it's a non-permanent status.

And so this has a lot of consequences, because if we grant corporate status to AIs that we want to give personhood to, we're granting them something that can then be taken away.

It comes with limited rights, as opposed to natural personhood, where we're actually recognizing a pre-existing set of facts about the AI system.

And so to me, that's a very, very important point.

And then the other issue that we bring up in our paper that I wrote with Jonathan Simon and Frederic Pinard on this question is that corporate personhood is for groups of humans.