Responsibility and Artificial Intelligence: Not a Rupture of Law, but a Test of Rigor

 I — A Difficulty of Attribution, Not an Absence of Law

The emergence of artificial intelligence does not disrupt the law of liability. It challenges the way we are accustomed to applying it.

The now-familiar argument is that AI, capable of producing legal effects without prior human intervention and lacking material substance, undermines the principle that there can be no fault without a responsible party.

Such reactions are not new. Similar concerns have arisen whenever social evolution seemed to outpace legal frameworks. Yet this reasoning rests on a questionable assumption: that law can only function where a clearly identifiable author must answer for an act.

In reality, the law has long accepted that liability may arise independently of direct personal action. Liability for the acts of others and liability for things demonstrate that attribution does not depend solely on identifying an actor, but on establishing a relevant link between control, organization, or authority and the resulting effects.

From this perspective, artificial intelligence does not create a legal vacuum. It reveals the limits of our reflexes in attributing responsibility.

AI systems involve fragmented human intervention: design, training, deployment, and use are distributed across multiple actors. This fragmentation, combined with a degree of functional autonomy, complicates causal analysis.

Yet complexity does not mean impossibility. It reflects a diffusion of responsibility, not its disappearance.

The issue is not the absence of responsibility, but the difficulty of locating it clearly. What was once easily assigned must now be reconstructed.

Artificial intelligence does not eliminate responsibility — it makes the identification of its origin more demanding.

II — The Temptation of a New Legal Regime: An Excessive ResponsE

In response, a growing tendency seeks to create entirely new legal categories, including granting legal personality to AI or establishing autonomous liability regimes.

Such approaches rest on a flawed analysis.

They assume that technological novelty requires legal rupture. History shows otherwise: law evolves through adaptation, not reinvention.

Granting legal personality to AI does not resolve the issue. It merely displaces it, attributing to the machine what belongs to the human structures that design and operate it.

Similarly, creating separate liability regimes risks fragmenting legal coherence.

The real difficulty lies not in the inadequacy of existing categories, but in their rigorous application.

The question is not whether we must invent new law, but whether we are still capable of applying existing law properly.

III — Reorganizing Responsibility: An Adjustment, Not a Revolution

Artificial intelligence requires a shift in perspective.

The central question is no longer: who acted?
But rather: who must answer for it, and on what basis?

Liability must be understood through structures of control, organization, and mastery.

The aim is not to artificially designate a single responsible party, but to reconstruct a coherent architecture of responsibility that reflects technical reality.

Responsibility does not disappear — it changes form.

It becomes less a matter of immediate attribution and more a matter of organizing control within a legal framework.

IV — A Practical Approach to ResponsibilitY

Primary responsibility lies with the designer, by virtue of the power of conception, orientation, and control over the system.

Courts will examine how the AI was designed, trained, and supervised, as well as the intention underlying its creation.

This power entails a continuous duty of oversight.

At the same time, users bear responsibility for the conditions under which the system is used.

Judges must assess whether harmful outcomes result from improper or deliberate use.

The law already possesses the tools necessary to integrate this “bodiless intelligence,” provided they are applied with rigor.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, artificial intelligence does not defeat the law.
It defeats a certain way of thinking about the law, one that remains too attached to simple patterns where reality is no longer simple.

What AI disrupts is not our rules, but our intellectual comfort.

It deprives us of the easy reflex of immediately attaching an act to an identifiable author, and forces us to return to what has always been at the heart of the law of responsibility: the search for the true origin of situations within the human structures that make them possible.

For there is no intelligence without organization.
And there is no organization without responsibility.

Accordingly, the question is not whether the law must change, nor whether new categories should be invented to keep pace with technology.

The more demanding question is this: are we still capable of identifying, with rigor, where the origin of what occurs truly lies?

Artificial intelligence does not make responsibility disappear.
It makes it impossible not to think about it properly.

END

The original text was written in French

Patrick Houyoux LL.M.

Fondateur et président de PT SYDECO, il conçoit des architectures d’intelligence artificielle et de cybersécurité souveraine. Ses travaux portent sur les transformations philosophiques induites par la technique contemporaine.

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