Administering the expressive society

This paper approaches the issue of Artificial Intelligence and how it is regulated through the EU's emerging 'Digital Constitution.' Current regulatory efforts assume AI to be a set of tools that may or may not have a harmful impact on people, societies or democratic institution. Law's job in this mode is, with providers, to identify harmful content and prohibit it, or to identify risky products and prohibit them. <br/><br/>I argue that law must find strategies that go beyond this regulatory mode. Drawing on Mireille Hildebrandt's argument that we increasingly live in an 'onlife' world, I point to the central role that expression plays in democratic societies. With human expression increasingly curated by AI, a key issue is raised for law. AI is increasingly not simply a technology that has an impact on the fabric of society: AI is the fabric of society. In these circumstances, law needs to turn to defending the role of the human in the human-technology constellation within which ostensibly human expression is composed.