Oh absolutely. The legal situation is completely clear. AIs simply don't have rights or responsibilities. And the law as it applies to humans is premised on the assumption of free will: that a person can choose to obey the law or not, and bear the responsibility of the consequences.

But that interpretation of Free Will is a legal fiction. Because of course what people do is determined by their upbringing and their opportunities and the environment that they have. In fact, that's an argument of a lot of legal reform movements that seek to move responsibility from the individual. The goal of the law is to assign responsibility and create a set of incentives which will hopefully result in orderly society.

But in the AI debate, we're not just creating incentives for an orderly Society, we're talking about the nature of creativity and the impetus to act. And by that measure I don't think there is a significant difference between AIs and human beings.

Some people get stuck in a rut of a particular kind of thinking and are unable to speculate what would happen if or when a set of conditions occurs.

LeCun is a good example of someone that's bet on the wrong horse, and keeps doubling down in spite of evidence to the contrary. It's to the point where what he says has nearly zero predictive power on future events.

I love playing around with AI, but we are playing a dangerous game at this point and it's one a lot of people don't seem to fully comprehend.