AI technology poses several legal challenges, including the need for objective standards to regulate AI agents that lack intentions, determining liability for AI-generated content, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations, addressing issues of bias and discrimination, and establishing frameworks for the ethical use of AI.
The Yale Law School paper proposes regulating AI by treating AI programs as tools used by human beings and organizations, making them responsible for the AI's actions. It suggests imposing duties of reasonable care and risk reduction on designers, implementers, and deployers of AI technologies, and holding human principals accountable for AI agents' actions, similar to the principal-agent relationship in Tort Law.
The traditional legal principle challenged by AI's lack of intent is mens rea, which refers to the mental state of the actor. It is a critical concept in determining liability in various legal areas such as freedom of speech, copyright, and criminal law. Since AI agents do not possess intentions in the same way humans do, the application of mens rea becomes problematic in the context of AI-related cases.