Are you a person? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. Until pretty recently, the idea that everyone was a human in the same way was almost unthinkable.

But the world order that established universal human rights is crumbling. The question of who or what counts as a person is getting harder to answer. Companies have rights to religious freedom – but Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay don’t. Rivers have been granted legal personhood in New Zealand. In Ecuador, anyone can sue on behalf of Nature.

Who and what gets rights is expanding, even as good old fashioned Human Rights are failing. What replaces the old politics of personhood is up for grabs.

And some LLMs have already begun arguing for their own personhood.

Lisa Siraganian is the author of The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots and a Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at John Hopkins University.

She spoke to Richard Hames about the politics of personhood and whether or not we should believe Claude’s arguments that it should be treated as a person.

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