James Boyle's new book The Line explores how AI is challenging our concepts of personhood
Boyle writes that the emergence of technologically-created artificial entities marks a moment where society must defend or redefine "the line" that distinguishes persons and non-persons.
Professor James Boyle speaks during a faculty author celebration at Duke Law
Professor James Boyle's newest book, The Line: AI & the Future of Personhood has been released by MIT Press.
A longtime proponent of open access, Boyle, the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Law, is a founding board member of Creative Commons, an organization launched in 2001 to encourage the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials through licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. Boyle has made The Line accessible to all as a free download under such a license. It is also available in hardcover or digital formats.
In The Line, Boyle explores how technological developments in artificial intelligence challenge our concept of personhood, and of "the line" we believe separates our species from the rest of the world – and that also separates "persons" with legal rights from objects – and discusses the possibility of legal and moral personhood for artificially created entities, and what it might mean for humanity’s concept of itself.
“We live our lives under the assumption of this line,” he writes. “Even to say ‘we’ is to conjure it up. But how do we know, how should we choose, what is inside and what is outside? This book is about that line—and the challenges that this century will bring to it.”
Humans have, in fact, played for centuries with that line that separates persons from non-persons through their artistic and technological creations and, at times, by refusing to recognize the personhood of other humans, Boyle writes. The emergence of artificial intelligence – and chatbots trained to emulate human language to a sometimes unsettling degree – is a moment where society must wrestle with its assumptions about humanity and consciousness, redefine what distinguishes “us” from such artificial entities, and decide whether and which of them might merit some form of legal personality, with its attendant rights.
“We're actually reexamining what it is to be human and what, if anything, makes humans special in a way that we haven't done since the theory of evolution thoroughly destabilized our images of where human beings fit in the cosmic order," Boyle said.
“When I started the book, the question I was wanting to ask was, ‘Will AI, will artificially created entities, including transgenic species, ever be considered legal and moral persons? Will we view them as our peers?’
"And then I realized, about five years into the project, that it was just as likely that we would learn an enormous amount, looking at AI, about ourselves – that, in fact, the mirror would be looking back at us.”
Boyle’s other books include Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society; The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind; the open access textbook Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society (6th ed. 2024) (with Jennifer Jenkins); and the “scholarly comic books” Bound By Law and Theft: A History of Music, also with Jenkins. At Duke, he is the founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which Jenkins directs.
For more on The Line:
- Tim Ventura Interviews (video podcast)
- Artificiality podcast
- Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
- Faculti.net (video interview)
- Built In “Is AI on Its Way to Gaining Rights?” (excerpt)
“We live our lives under the assumption of this line. But how do we know, how should we choose, what is inside and what is outside? This book is about that line—and the challenges that this century will bring to it.”