Legal personality for artefacts breaks justice and democracy

Yet another reply letter from me, to a correspondent talking about a technical protocol to recognise AI persons, and who had read "Robots Should Be Slaves" and "Just an Artefact" [italics indicates not in my original reply, added on reflection]:

thank you for the honour of your attention to my work. Unfortunately, that is my early work – we have fleshed it out much better more recently. Please see the papers below. But the bottom line is it is impossible to build an artefact that is peer to a human and therefore awarding any artefact legal personhood would break justice and democracy.  Indeed, allowing humans too much power (or acknowledging in them too little) does the same! But anything manufacturable and quickly replicable becomes just a vector of power for capital. And the foundations models that are not so replicable are corporate infrastructure, also not people. 

Here are the three more recent papers, and this will also be detailed in the book I'm trying to write. Thank you for your understanding, I am unlikely to reply again. But if you believe you already are or have an AI person, you may also want to read this blogpost https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2025/09/sense-of-sentience.html 

A Moral Agency Framework for Legitimate Integration of AI in Bureaucracies

Chris Schmitz and Joanna J. Bryson, Sailing the Uncharted Waters: Public Administration and Emerging Technologies, Tan, Dan, and Sorin (eds.) Edwin Elgar Publishing, Cheltham, in press, expected 2026. 

Do We Collaborate With What We Design?

Katie D. Evans, Scott A. Robbins, and Joanna J. Bryson, Topics in Cognitive Science, 17(2): 392-411, April 2025. 

Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons

Joanna J. Bryson, Mihailis E. Diamantis, and Thomas D. Grant, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 25(3):273–291, Sep 2017.

Super pleased with the pictures Andrea Comas took of me for El País last year, so I bought them! This one's on my publications page now, and another is on my home page.