A union between human and machine? Not on this Ohio Republican’s watch.
A bill introduced last month by Buckeye state representative Thaddeus Claggett, from Licking County, would block AI systems from having legal personhood by declaring them to be “nonsentient entities,” NBC4 News reports. It would also mean that AIs wouldn’t be able to marry a human or another AI.
“As the computer systems improve in their capacity to act more like humans, we want to be sure we have prohibitions in our law that prohibit those systems from ever being human in their agency,” Claggett, who chairs Ohio’s House Technology and Innovation Committee, told NBC4 in a new interview.
Marriage can grant humans legal powers over other people. Claggett argues the bill will help stop AI from assuming the roles held by spouses, like having power of attorney, or making financial or medical decisions on another’s behalf.
“People need to understand, we’re not talking about marching down the aisle to some tune and having a ceremony with the robot that’ll be on our streets here in a year or two,” Claggett said. “That could happen, but that’s not really what we’re saying.”
Various people have claimed to marry AI chatbots — even sometimes with elaborate mock weddings — but there’s no legal recognition of the unions, making it a bit unclear what Claggett’s bill is supposed to accomplish.
Still, there’s plenty of reason to be worried about how humans are developing relationships with AI models. Popular chatbots are capable of being eerily lifelike, effortlessly playing along with any conversation they’re thrown into. Often, the AI responses are sycophantic, confirming a human’s beliefs no matter how unfounded, and creating an impression that they’re actually alive or intelligent. That makes them quite adept at wrapping lonely sad sacks around their fingers. A recent survey, for example, indicated that nearly a third of US adults said they’ve had an “intimate or romantic” relationship with an AI chatbot.
Making matters worse, AI chatbots frequently go off the rails and say stuff they’re not supposed to. The consequences of this can be extreme. Psychiatrists are growing increasingly concerned with reports of so-called “AI psychosis,” a term that describes alarming mental health episodes where a user suffers severe delusions and breaks with reality after becoming obsessed with a chatbot. Some of these episodes have ended in suicide and murder.
Marriage isn’t the only thing Claggett’s trying to outlaw for AIs. If the bill were to be passed, AIs would be banned from owning or controlling real estate, intellectual property, or financial accounts, per NBC4. It would also ban them from serving in a management, director, or officer role at companies, and pin the harm caused by an AI system on its human owners or creators.
“The public needs to understand the extreme risk,” Claggett told NBC4. “Because of the way this stuff is moving so rapidly, in Ohio, we have a number of bills before our technology committee that [are] attempting to put some guardrails in place so that we always have a human in charge of the technology, not the other way around.”
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