Three Laws Blog: Law and Artificial Intelligence

Deeks on Delegating War Initiation to Machines @UVALaw @AustJIA

Ashley Deeks, University of Virginia School of Law, has published Delegating War Initiation to Machines at 78 Australian Journal of International Affairs 148 (2024). Here is the abstract.

The use of autonomy to initiate force, which states may begin to view as necessary to protect against hypersonic attacks and other forms of "hyperwar," may effectively constitute a delegation of war-initiation decision making to a machine. Yet legal questions about whether and when the leader of a country may delegate their decision making to others - and normative questions about whether he should do so - can be complicated. Any state that intends to introduce significant autonomy into such systems should assess whether and how the use of autonomy in war initiation comports with its domestic laws and norms that govern the delegation of the use of force.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Haneman on The Law of Digital Resurrection @TaxLawProf @BCLawReview @CreightonLaw

Victoria J. Haneman, Creighton University School of Law, is publishing The Law of Digital Resurrection in the B. C. L. Rev. (2025). Here is the abstract.

The digital right to be dead has yet to be recognized as an important legal right. Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and nanotechnology have progressed to the point that personal data can be used to resurrect the deceased in digital form with appearance, voice, emotion, and memory recreated to allow interaction with a digital app, chat bot, or avatar that may be indistinguishable from that with a living person. Users may now have a completely immersive experience simply by loading the personal data of the deceased into a neural network to create a chatbot that inherits features and idiosyncrasies of the deceased and dynamically learns with increased communication. There is no legal or regulatory landscape against which to estate plan to protect those who would avoid digital resurrection, and few privacy rights for the deceased. This is an intersection of death, technology, and privacy law that has remained relatively ignored until recently. This Article is the first to respect death as an important and distinguishing part of the conversation about regulating digital resurrection. Death has long had a strained relationship with the law, giving rise to dramatically different needs and idiosyncratic legal rules. The law of the dead reflects the careful balance between the power of the state and an individual's wishes, and it may be the only doctrinal space in which we legally protect remembrance. This Article frames the importance of almost half of a millennium of policy undergirding the law of the deceased, and proposes a paradigm focused upon a right of deletion for the deceased over source material (data), rather than testamentary control over the outcome (digital resurrection), with the suggestion that existing protections are likely sufficient to protect against unauthorized commercial resurrections.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.