Protecting Sentient Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Lay Intuitions on Standing, Personhood, and General Legal Protection

Abstract

To what extent, if any, should the law protect sentient artificial intelligence (that is, AI that can feel pleasure or pain)? Here we surveyed United States adults (n = 1,061) on their views regarding granting 1) general legal protection, 2) legal personhood, and 3) standing to bring forth a lawsuit, with respect to sentient AI and eight other groups: humans in the jurisdiction, humans outside the jurisdiction, corporations, unions, non-human animals, the environment, humans living in the near future, and humans living in the far future. Roughly one-third of participants endorsed granting personhood and standing to sentient AI (assuming its existence) in at least some cases, the lowest of any group surveyed on, and rated the desired level of protection for sentient AI as lower than all groups other than corporations. We further investigated and observed political differences in responses; liberals were more likely to endorse legal protection and personhood for sentient AI than conservatives. Taken together, these results suggest that laypeople are not by-and-large in favor of granting legal protection to AI, and that the ordinary conception of legal status, similar to codified legal doctrine, is not based on a mere capacity to feel pleasure and pain. At the same time, the observed political differences suggest that previous literature regarding political differences in empathy and moral circle expansion apply to artificially intelligent systems and extend partially, though not entirely, to legal consideration, as well.

Which Artificial Intelligences Do People Care About Most? A Conjoint Experiment on Moral Consideration

“…Such questions have long been popular in science fiction and philosophy. They are of increasing interest to human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers with the rise of sophisticated AIs, such as social robots and chatbots, that evoke moral reactions from humans [4,25,31,46,47,53]. For example, people feel empathy towards robots being harmed Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”

“…A recent study on the companionship chatbot Replika found that users expressed moral sentiments, such as feeling guilt for causing the chatbot's "death" when deleting the app and for being unable to give their Replika enough emotional support [43]. While most people do not yet explicitly consider AIs to be subjects of moral consideration [53,59], many somewhat support protecting AIs from cruel treatment [46] and granting legal rights to sentient AIs [47]. People also attribute future AIs morally relevant capacities, such as emotions [53].…”

Opportunities and challenges of traditional Chinese medicine doctors in the era of artificial intelligence

“…There are no clear legal definitions or provisions regarding medical disputes caused by AI-assisted TCM diagnoses ( 37 ). While AI diagnostics far surpass physicians in speed and may achieve clinical accuracy levels, responsible entities in case of errors require rational demarcation.…”

Robots and AI as Legal Subjects? Disentangling the Ontological and Functional Perspective

“…Whether advanced robots and AI applications (henceforth, RAI) are, should, and eventually will be considered as “subjects” rather than mere “objects” is a question that has strongly characterized the social, philosophical, and legal debate since Solum’s seminar article on “Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligence” ( Solum, 1992 ), and arguably even earlier ( Turing, 1950 ; Putman, 1964 ; Nagel, 1974 ; Bunge, 1977 ; Taylor, 1977 ; Searle, 1980 ; Searle, 1984 ; McNally and Inayatullah, 1988 ). However, debates have significantly intensified over the last two decades, with interest in both the scientific and non-academic circles raising every time a new technology rolls out (e.g., autonomous cars being tested in real-life scenarios on our streets), or an outstanding socio-legal development occurs (e.g., the humanoid Sophia receiving Saudi Arabian citizenship) 1 (see, e.g., Allen et al, 2000 ; Allen et al, 2005 ; Teubner, 2006 ; Chrisley, 2008 ; Coeckelbergh, 2010 ; Koops et al, 2010 ; Gunkel, 2012 ; Basl, 2014 ; Balkin, 2015a ; Iannì and Monterossi, 2017 ; Christman, 2018 ; Gunkel, 2018 ; Nyholm, 2018 ; Pagallo, 2018b ; Santoni de Sio and van den Hoven, 2018 ; Lior, 2019 ; Loh, 2019 ; Turner, 2019 ; Wagner, 2019 ; Andreotta, 2021 ; Basl et al, 2020 ; Bennett and Daly, 2020 ; Dignum, 2020 ; Gunkel, 2020 ; Kingwell, 2020 ; Osborne, 2020 ; Powell, 2020 ; Serafimova, 2020 ; Wheeler, 2020 ; De Pagter, 2021 ; Gabriel, 2021 ; Gogoshin, 2021 ; Gordon, 2021 ; Gunkel and Wales, 2021 ; Joshua, 2021 ; Kiršienė et al, 2021 ; Martínez and Winter 2021 ; Schröder, 2021 ; Singer, 2021 ).…”