Rights against erasure: is the legal landscape ready for digital companions? - Oxford Intersections: AI in Society (link), March 2025
As digital companion apps proliferate, so do concerns about their impact. While existing scholarship primarily focuses on whether, from a normative point of view, they should exist, this article addresses a critical gap: the need for “rights against erasure” to protect users from the alteration or deletion of digital companions. Companies like Replika promote their digital companions as lifelong partners and recognize that, to users, digital companions can be akin to real life romantic partners. Yet these companies can unilaterally delete or alter digital companions at will, leaving users without any right of recourse. In thinking about ways to tackle this issue, I argue that simply extending fiduciary requirements to AI companies developing digital companions is insufficient. By contrast, rights against erasure should be framed as data portability rights. Doing so would: detangle users’ desires to retain their digital companions from the need to prove whether digital companions help wellbeing; hold companies accountable to their promises to users; bolster an underused data protection right; and reinforce the fact that, in line with other co-existing rights, users should have access to and control over their data. Given the adoption rate of digital companions and increased reliance on them as tools with which to alleviate widespread loneliness and social isolation, rights against erasure, framed as data portability rights, will assist in developing appropriate legal frameworks in the immediate future.
Do Androids dream of electric weeds? - It’s Freezing in LA! (link), November 2023
What would happen if AI models were built on plants’ intelligence?
È possibile farla franca con i meta-abusi? Come affrontare il crimine virtuale nel mondo reale riconoscendo che le azioni del nostro avatar sono le nostre - Kabul Magazine (link - original Italian / PDF - English translation), September 2022
Exploring the idea of crime in the metaverse using the theory of multiple selves to conclude that our avatar’s actions are referable to us.
Creative AIs and the Law: a three-part series published in Roman Road Journal, November 2018 - September 2019
With the field of AI developing by leaps and bounds, what legal rights are granted to autonomous non-human beings?
Part I - examining content produced by creative AIs in light of existing and potential copyright protection link / PDF
Part II - questioning the association between authorship and personhood, by posing the hypothetical situation of a runway collaboration between creative AIs link / PDF
Part III - elaborating on the hypothetical: what happens when AI-caused accidents inevitably occur? link / PDF