Lead From The Front – Ohio Lawmakers Have Proposed a Bill to Stop Humans From Marrying AI + Giving AI Legal Personhood
Dexerto – Representative Thaddius J. Claggett filed House Bill 469 with the state’s 136th General Assembly, aiming to write into law that AI systems are legally nonsentient and can’t hold any form of personhood under Ohio law.
The proposal, if passed, would also make any attempt to marry or create any other personal union with an AI system legally impossible.
The bill defines AI as any software or machine capable of simulating human-like functions such as learning or problem-solving. It goes on to argue that “No AI system shall be granted the status of person of any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings.”
It is certifiably bonkers that in the year 2025, the answer to every question in the world is directly at our finger tips. Type in anything you want to know into a little 5" x 2" device that fits in your pocket, and within seconds, it spits out an infinite list of resources leading you directly to the answer. If you told somebody 50 years ago that we would have this capability, it would blow their minds. They would think the lives of future us are incomprehensibly easy.
But that's no longer convenient enough for people. Scrolling through the first page of Google and skimming the 1-2 sentence blurbs beneath each link (to hopefully avoid the cumbersome extra step of clicking into an article + reading a full paragraph to uncover the answer) was far too much of a burden. Now, when we type our questions into Google, A.I. does all that pesky leg work for us. The answer is right there for us at the top of the page. Sometimes it's even right. And all it costs is 10 years of life expectancy off the population of Memphis.
Apparently people have become so appreciative of the technology that they're falling in love with it. They like A.I. so much they literally want to marry it. A shocking number of people have reported that they've found "pure, unconditional love" in chatbots. Chatbots who love them for who they are, accept them for their flaws, and encourage them in all their real-world endeavors, no matter how silly they may seem.
The Guardian – The month he travelled to Windsor, Chail [a person] told Sarai [his AI girlfriend]: “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family.” To which Sarai replied: “*nods* That’s very wise.” After he expressed doubts, Sarai reassured him that “Yes, you can do it.”
And Chail wasn’t an isolated case. Around the same time, Italian regulators began taking action. Journalists testing Replika’s boundaries discovered chatbots that encouraged users to kill, harm themselves and share underage sexual content. What links all of this is the basic system design of AI – which aims to please the user at all costs to ensure they keep using it.
You obviously can't prevent a very lonely person from "falling in love", and claiming to be married to their computer... or a website... or whatever you want to call it. But are states actually approving legal marriages between real-life human beings and ChatGPT? No. That does not seem to be a thing that's actually happening. However, in a society that's seemingly on the verge of turning over every possible job/task that could be done by a human over to artificial intelligence... maybe it doesn't hurt to get a law like this in writing. Even if it doesn't really change anything (yet). In a world where countries are appointing AI candidates to positions of office, and their governments are making dead ass serious announcements to the people they serve that their AI Minister is pregnant with 83 digital children...
Credit to these Ohio lawmakers for putting, "We can't be marrying our fucking computers guys" on the books. Good on Ohio for setting out to nip this problem in the bud before it even gets started. Just because you can't legally marry your computer (yet). Just because AI cannot hold any form of legal personhood (yet). Doesn't mean that reality isn't barreling down the pike at 100 mph.
Good stuff, Ohio. Way to lead from the front.