Comparative Law Researches

Comparative Law Researches

Influence, Immersion, Intensity, Integration, Interaction: Five Frames for the future of AI Law and Policy

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Mehrdad Teymouri 1
Seyyed Sajjad Kazemi 2
1 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Criminal Law and Criminology, Department of Law, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Malayer University, Malayer, Iran.
2 Associate Professor in Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Malayer University, Malayer, Iran
10.48311/clr.2025.116728.82777
Abstract
Law and policy discussions concerning the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) upon society are stagnating. By this, we mean that contemporary discussions adopt implicit assumptions in their approaches to AI, which presuppose the characteristics of entity, externality, and exclusivity. In other words, for law and policy purposes: AI is often treated as something (encapsulated by AI personhood proposals); as the other (discernible from concerns that human beings are the decision subjects ofAI applications); and as artificial (thereby concentrating on the artefactual characteristics of AI). Taken together, these form an overly narrow model of AI and unnecessarily constrain the palette of law and policy responses to both the challenges and opportunities presented by the technology. As a step towards rounding out law and policy responses to AI,with a viewto providing greater societal resilience to, and preparedness for, technologically-induced disruption, we suggest a more integrated and open-minded approach in how we model AI: influence, where human behaviour is directed and manipulated; immersion,where the distinctions between physical and virtual realities dissolve; intensity, where realities and experiences can be sharpened, lengthened, or otherwise altered; integration, where the boundaries between AI and human are being blurred; and interaction, where feedback loops undermine notions of linearity and causality. These pivots suggest different types of human relationships with AI, drawing attention to the legal and policy implications of engaging in AI-influenced worlds. We will ground these conceptually driven policy framing pivots in examples involving harm. These will demonstrate how contemporary law and policy framings are overly narrow and too dependent on previous comforting pathways.Wewill suggest that further problem-finding endeavours will be necessary to ensure more robust and resilient law and policy responses to the challenges posed by AI.




Keywords
Extended Reality (XR)
Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR)
Immersion
Manipulation
Virtual Violence
Legal Disruption
Virtual Environments
Law and Policy Responses
Subjects
1.     Agrafiotis I, Nurse JRC, Goldsmith M et al. (2018). A taxonomy of cyber-harms: Defining the impacts of cyber-attacks and understanding how they propagate. Journal of Cybersecurity 4: https://doi. org/10.1093/cybsec/tyy006.
2.     Ananthaswamy A. (2016). Virtual reality could be an ethical minefield – are we ready? New Scientist
3.     Angwin J, Larson J, Mattu S, Kirchner L. (2016). Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks. ProPublica.
4.     Arriaga P, Esteves F, Carneiro P, Monteiro MB. (2008). Are the effects of Unreal violent video games pronounced when playing with a virtual reality system? Aggress Behav 34:521–538.
5.     Balkin JM. (2006). Law and Liberty in Virtual Worlds. In: Balkin J, Noveck BS (eds) The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. NYU Press, pp 86–117.
6.     Belamire J. (2016). My First Virtual Reality Groping. Medium
7.     Bennett Moses LB. (2007). Why Have a Theory of Law and Technological Change? Minn JL Sci & Tech 8:589–606.
8.     Bennett Moses L. (2016). Regulating in the Face of Sociotechnical Change. In: Brownsword R, Scotford E, Yeung K (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 573–596.
9. Bhuta N, Beck S, Geiβ R et al (eds). (2016). Autonomous Weapons Systems: Law, Ethics, Policy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
10. Booth R. (2014). Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions. The Guardian
11. Brownsword R. (2015). In the year 2061: from law to technological management. Law, Innovation and Technology 7:1–51.
12. Brownsword R. (2016). Technological management and the Rule of Law. Law, Innovation and Technology 8:100–140.
13. Brynjolfsson E, McAfee A (2014) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company Calo R (2015) Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw. Cal L Rev 103:513.
14. Calo R. (2016). Robots as Legal Metaphors. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 30:209–237.
15. Cline E. (2011). Ready Player One. Broadway Paperbacks.
16. Danaher J. (2019). Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work. Harvard University Press.
17. Danaher J. (2020). Axiological Futurism: The Systematic Study of the Future of Human Values.
18. Ford M. (2015). The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment. One World, London.
19. Greyson B. (2021). After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. Bantam Press, London.
20. Harris S. (2016). Can we build AI without losing control over it? TED Conference. https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it?language=nl
21. Hvistendahl M. (2017). Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking. WIRED.
22. Jeffries S. (2018). Jordan Wolfson: “This is real abuse – not a simulation.” The Guardian.
23. Johnson S. (2011). Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation. Penguin, London.
24. King LW (translator). (2015). The Code of Hammurabi. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
25. Kramer ADI, Guillory JE, Hancock JT. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. PNAS 111:8788–8790.
26. Lastowka FG, Hunter D. (2006a). Virtual Worlds: A Primer. In: Balkin J, Noveck BS (eds) The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. NYU Press, pp 13–28.
27. Lastowka FG, Hunter D. (2006b). Virtual Crime. In: Balkin J, Noveck BS (eds) The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. NYU Press, pp 121–136.
28. Lavoie R, Main K, King C, King D. (2021). Virtual experience, real consequences: the potential negative emotional consequences of virtual reality gameplay. Virtual Reality 25:69–81.
29. Legg S, Hutter M. (2007). A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence. arXiv:07063639 [cs]
30. Lessig L. (1999). The Law of the Horse: What Cyber Law Might Teach. Harv L Rev 113:501.
31. Liu H-Y. (2018). The Power Structure of Artificial Intelligence. Law, Innovation and Technology 10:197–229.
32. Liu H-Y. (2019). From the Autonomy Framework towards Networks and Systems Approaches for “Autonomous” Weapons Systems. Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies 10:89– 110.
33. Liu H-Y. (2021). AI Challenges and the Inadequacy of Human Rights Protections. Criminal Justice Ethics 40:2–22.
34. Liu H-Y, Maas MM. (2021). ‘Solving for X?’: Towards a problem-finding framework that grounds long-term governance strategies for artificial intelligence. Futures 126:102672.
35. Liu H-Y, Maas M, Danaher J et al. (2020). Artificial Intelligence and Legal Disruption: A New Model for Analysis. Law, Innovation and Technology 12:205–258.
36. MacKellar C. (2019). Cyborg Mind: What Brain-Computer and Mind-Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics. Berghahn, New York/Oxford.
37. Mileva G. (2020). Can Virtual Reality Games Lead To Violent Behavior? AR Post
38. Mistreanu S. (2018). Life Inside China’s Social Credit Laboratory. Foreign Policy.
39. Moshakis A. (2021). What do near-death experiences mean, and why do they fascinate us? The Guardian.
40. Norman DA. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
41. Ricker T. (2016). Elon Musk: We’re already cyborgs. The Verge.
42. Rudin C, Radin J (2019) Why Are We Using Black Box Models in AI When We Don’t Need To? A Lesson From An Explainable AI Competition. Harvard Data Science Review 1:1–9.
43. Saxe JG. (1872). The Blind Men and the Elephant. J. Osgood, Boston
44. Susser D. (2019). Invisible Influence: Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Adaptive Choice. Architectures. In: Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society. Honolulu, Hawaii.
45. Valentish J. (2019). “Real” violence: coming to grips with the ethics of virtual reality brutality. The Guardian.
46. Vaughn R. (2019). Is Virtual Reality the Future of Courtrooms? Oklahoma Bar Association 90:10
47. Veitch S. (2007). Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering. Routledge Cavendish, Oxford
48.  Wong JC. (2016). Sexual harassment in virtual reality feels all too real – “it’s creepy beyond creepy.” The Guardian.
49. Yeung K. (2017). ‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a mode of regulation by design. Information, Communication & Society 20:118–136.
50. Zuboff S. (2019). “We Make Them Dance”: Surveillance Capitalism, the Rise of Instrumental Power, and the Threat to Human Rights. In: Jørgensen RF (ed) Human Rights in the Age of Platforms. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp 3–51.