The 2025 Grafstein Lecture in Communications

"Communicating with ChatGPT? Legal ePersons, Language, and the Temptations of Mimicry and Artifice"

Professor Lisa Siraganian, JD, PhD
J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities
Department of Comparative Thought and Literature
Johns Hopkins University

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.

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