According to Solaiman (2017), a legal entity means the ability to exercise rights and perform duties. For Bryson et al. (2017), three issues related to legal personality are directly relevant to the debate on electronic personality. First, legal personality is a fiction. Legal personality is not necessarily correlated with an ethical conception of legal personality. Secondly, legal personality is divisible. A legal system may treat legal persons differently with respect to certain rights and obligations. Third, the rights and obligations that a legal entity may legally have may not coincide with those it actually has (Bryson, 2018). Even if we agree with the points made, we believe that the heuristic function of the term legal person plays a crucial role in the analysis of the proposal to create an electronic personality. Just as it is important to separate the idea of legal personality from the notion of legal personality, it should also be noted that the moral community is not limited to the figure of moral actors who currently reach the figure of moral patients affected by the actions of (rational) actors.
This means that rights should not be confused with legal personality. Similarly, the courts may recognize certain legal rights without this implying recognition of a legal person or a legal person in general. It should be emphasized that equipping incident AI with legal entities that allow it to act as an independent business actor does not mean accepting the idea that AI has ultimate value. On the contrary, the legal personality of an AI can serve various purposes that may have nothing to do with the AI itself, such as profitability or risk diversification. Of course, if some AIs ever become sensitive, many of the issues discussed in this chapter will need to be reconsidered. The assumption that natural legal personality is limited to man is so deeply rooted in most legal systems that it is not even articulated. Footnote 101 The failure to grant comparable rights, even to our closest evolutionary cousins, does not bode well for proponents of AI personality based on presumed inherent qualities. Footnote 102 It can be concluded that the provisions of the Act reflect the fundamental ethical and moral principles of society. The legal system is based on the premise of a certain value system. For modern democratic countries, this system should be based on a culturally neutral understanding of human beings (Chauvin, 2020).
Human dignity derives from this humanity, whereas in the field of civil law, legal capacity is understood as the possibility of acquiring rights and obligations arising from this dignity. The legal capacity of a human being and, consequently, his status as a legal person are conferred by law. It therefore derives from legal regulations, although it confirms ideologically neutral human dignity. As AI systems become more sophisticated and play a larger role in society, there are at least two different reasons why they might be recognized as individuals before the law. The first is that there is someone you can blame if something goes wrong. This is presented as a response to potential accountability gaps created by their speed, autonomy and opacity. Footnote 5 However, a second reason to recognize personality is to make sure there is someone to reward when things are going well. For example, more and more documents examine the intellectual property created by AI systems. Age or incapacity for work have no influence on a person`s legal capacity.
For example, a small child is an entity before the law. Of course, it will not be able to sign a treaty independently, but that does not affect its legal capacity. The possibility of performing a contract autonomously results from the attribute of legal capacity. This attribute is secondary to the status of legal entity itself. Board games aside, why should it be important for a computer to be “smart”? For several decades, the Turing test has been associated with the question of whether AI itself is possible rather than the legal status of such an entity. Yet it has been frequently used in discussions of the legal personality of AI since Lawrence Solum`s groundbreaking 1992 paper. Footnote 4 Although the Turing test is no longer considered a serious measure of modern AI in the technical sense, the longevity of the Turing test as a trope indicates a tension in personality debates that is often overlooked. The similarities between Peculium and certain aspects of AI`s legal personality are also noted by Ugo Pagallo in Pagallo, The Laws of Robots (No. 11). Safi, M. , “Ganges and Yamuna Rivers grants the same legal status as humans” (2016) accessed August 31, 2021.