Ghost-Hunting in AI and the Law

Abstract

Generative AI is booming. This technology offers amazing opportunities for growth in various business sectors and creates the opportunity for swift progress on medical innovations, climate change, world hunger, and innumerable other areas. AI also poses a number of challenges, though, such as replacing human workers and exacerbating pernicious biases. Another major concern about generative AI is singularity-the idea that this technology could surpass human intelligence and subjugate us or render us extinct. Although some commentators discount this possibility, the fact that AI experts such as Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk share the singularity concern should at least give us pause. And this singularity concern highlights the increasingly relevant question of how different humans and machines are. Generative AI operates in a mechanistic manner, and if this AI can match or even surpass us in areas previously designated as uniquely human--such as in creativity and invention--then these traits in humans could be deterministically caused as well. It raises the question of whether there is a "Ghost in the Machine"--whether our minds are separate from our bodies and whether we possess free will. But our deep sense of morality, of the difference between right and wrong, is central to law. If human action is caused deterministically, then is it really just to punish people for their actions? Questions such as these are at the very heart of the law. This means that AI may offer us a unique glimpse into these important foundations of the law and also risks unsettling them. The mechanistic nature of AI, and its eerie similarities to any "ghost," casts a considerable shadow on the law.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, AI, culpability, free will, determinism, singularity, human exceptionalism, ghost in the machine