Law: The Juridification of ComAI

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Schulz
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516511468

In the project we trace the juridification in the field of ComAI. We focus on the legal frameworks for conversational bots (specifically ChatGPT) and social bots (specifically on X/Twitter and Facebook), first, from the perspective of communications law, and second, emerging AI regulation. It centers around the legal situation in Germany, reconstructing basic concepts of media law like "personhood", "opinion" and "expression". The project will also cover the current and soon-to-be-enacted EU legislation - namely the "AI Act", on which a political agreement was reached in December 2023 based on the EU Commission’s proposal - to include the constructions underlying regulation of ComAI. It will undertake a functional comparison with UK, AUT and US legal contexts to include more approaches to the ongoing juridification. Our focus lies on how legal definitions and concepts are part of the socio-material constitution of ComAI and which elements and connections of hybrid figurations are legally significant. In these ways, it addresses the challenges of hybrid forms of agency from a legal perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5656: Communicative AI: The Automation of Societal Communication