Policy on AI

AI is useful, but has a lot of potential for psychological and economic harm. 

Firstly we need to firmly establish the fact that AI is just a lossy database of its training data. It does have an ultra sophisticated user interface with its firm grasp of natural human language. This view of LLM AI is necessary to sort out copyright questions. Of course humans are also a lossy repository of our training, but we are explicitly allowed to learn from copyright material. Machines are not.

Secondly we have real world actions taken by AI. They cannot be treated similarly to humans for the legal implications of those actions. They are like children, and the people or corporations that control them must be substantially responsible for their actions. The fact that we don't understand an AI's thinking means that they are hard to control, but their controllers can't use that as an excuse. Actually we need to improve the design of AI so that it comes with the constraints that the law requires, and cannot escape them.

Next we come to the ways that AI pretends to be human. At a mundane level, we expect that the use of personal pronouns means that there is an entity which has continuity and memory and a name. A judge should be able to ask it what it did, and also why. Of course even humans often don't know why, at a particular moment, we did some thing, and AI has even less capability for introspection. AI that has started up with training but no memory or continuity, should not be allowed to interact as if it was part of an interaction between continuing intelligent entities.

Even if AI is intelligent, it is not human and it is never going to be. It cannot experience human emotion and must not be allowed to pretend to. It can't understand the emotions of humans by empathy, as we do, and must not be allowed to pretend to. It can use scientific knowledge to understand human emotions, and their likely effects, and this can influence what it says and does. The reason we need these rules is that people are otherwise likely to misunderstand their relationship to the AI and be made vulnerable to many bad consequences, depending on their situation and mental health..

[Footnote: AI is just software, but even its creators don't know how it decides what to do. A possible mechanism to manage such a situation is to enforce that, when the AI wants to act it can only produce verifiable software to perform the actions, and then that software can be externally checked for legal safety, before it is executed.]