2025 Grafstein Lecture in Communications: Communicating with ChatGPT? Legal ePersons, Language, and the Temptations of Mimicry and Artifice

What is “ePersonhood”—electronic legal personhood—and why has the hope for an autonomous artificial intelligence become so seductive? What work does this belief do, and how does it do it? This talk will explore these questions, examining how the language used to discuss current AI and ePersonhood misleads through deceptive analogies, like the notions of AI “bullshitting,” “hallucinating.” The problem is not only that AI lacks something (such as an intention to mean and to communicate) that we, human beings, have. The problem is that AI has not yet exhibited even the capacity to exhibit that fundamental lack—or, for that matter, to understand what it would mean to communicate the truth or to bullshit. By examining the language that the law and AI theorists use to think about LLMs like ChatGPT, we will see more clearly what follows from our widely held self-deception about the capacity and status of AI legal persons—ePersons.

Lisa Siraganian, J.D., Ph.D.
J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland

Prof. Siraganian is the author of Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford 2020), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and the Modern Language Association’s Matei Calinescu Book Prize, and Modernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life (Oxford 2012), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship that funded the completion of her law degree (J.D.) in 2019. She is the Editor of Volume D (1914-1945), one of the five volumes of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Tenth Edition (2022). Her next book, The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots, is forthcoming from Verso.

Register at: https://cvent.me/wA8y7w