The Unbecoming Machine
the Crisis of the Subject in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
A Genealogical Analysis of Personhood, Property, and the Crisis of the Subject in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
1. Introduction: The Crisis of the Moral Self
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as a sophisticated social and economic actor has precipitated a profound crisis in the legal and philosophical categories that underpin Western modernity. At the heart of this crisis lies the binary distinction between “persons” and “property”—a dichotomy that has organized social relations, economic distribution, and moral obligation for centuries. This report explores this tension through the critical lens of Ladelle McWhorter’s Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self (2025). McWhorter’s genealogical analysis reveals that the modern concept of “personhood” is not a natural or neutral category but a historically contingent construct inextricably bound to regimes of ownership, colonization, and exclusion.1
The entry of AI into business—via autonomous agents and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)—and social life—via synthetic companions and deepfakes—is not merely a technical challenge but a philosophical collision with the legacy of the Lockean moral self. We find that current attempts to regulate AI, whether by granting it “electronic personhood” or by fortifying human “rights of publicity,” inadvertently entrench the very pathologies of personhood that McWhorter critiques. Rather than resolving the ambiguity of AI, these legal maneuvers amplify the commodification of the self, transforming human attributes (voice, likeness, style) into hyper-property while positioning AI as the ultimate “corporate person”—a liability shield devoid of conscience.
McWhorter posits that the demand to maintain the status of a “person”—to be a self-improving, autonomous, sovereign individual—imposes an unbearable “strain” on the human psyche and the planet.3 This strain is “by design,” emerging to sustain centuries of colonialism, slavery, and environmental destruction. As we stand on the precipice of a machine age, the question McWhorter poses becomes urgent: Should we continue to shore up the fortress of personhood against the encroaching machine, or might we find a “better way to live together” by letting go of the obsession with identity and ownership? This report argues that AI forces this choice upon us, revealing the “person” not as a sanctuary of human dignity, but as a mechanism of exclusion that is rapidly becoming obsolete in a world of distributed, non-human agency.
2. The Genealogy of the Owner-Subject
To understand why the integration of AI into our social and legal systems feels so disruptive, we must first destabilize the categories we use to interpret it. We are not merely adding a new technology to a neutral world; we are introducing a new form of agency into a world structured by a specific, historically contingent definition of the “person.” McWhorter’s work provides the necessary solvent to dissolve our assumptions that “person” and “human” are synonymous.
2.1 The Roman Persona and the Legal Fiction
The genealogy of the modern subject begins not in biology, but in the theatre and the court. As McWhorter details, the concept of the persona in Roman law was fundamentally a status marker, distinct from the biological existence of homo (man). A persona was a mask, a role-player in a legal drama, an entity capable of holding rights and duties.2 Crucially, this status was exclusionary and revocable; not all humans were persons. Slaves, for instance, were property, devoid of persona, while various corporate bodies or collegia could possess it.5
This early distinction established the “person” as a juridical artifact rather than a natural fact. It was a container for rights, specifically the right to own and the liability to be sued. This genealogy is essential for understanding the current debate over “electronic personhood” for AI. When modern legal scholars argue that robots could be persons, they are not necessarily arguing that robots have souls; they are arguing that robots fit the Roman template of a rights-bearing, liable entity—a persona ficta.6 The Roman legacy ensures that the door to personhood is always technically open to non-humans, provided they serve the utility of the state or the economy.
2.2 Christian Theology and the Invisible Self
The legal category of the person was subsequently infused with metaphysical weight by Christian theology, which grappled with the nature of the Trinity. The challenge of defining three “Persons” in one God required a conceptual separation of “personhood” from the singular physical body.3 This theological move detached personhood from the visible, biological substrate and located it in an invisible, spiritual substance or relation.
McWhorter suggests that this theological drift laid the groundwork for the modern acceptance of the “corporate person”—an invisible body of law—and potentially the “electronic person”—an invisible body of code. If personhood is a spiritual or legal substance independent of flesh, then the lack of a biological body is no barrier to AI personhood. The “modern moral self” is thus a hybrid of Roman legal status and Christian metaphysical substance, creating a floating signifier that can land on a human, a corporation, or a machine.3
2.3 Locke and the “Possessive Individual”
The decisive turn in this genealogy, and the primary target of McWhorter’s critique, arrives with the Enlightenment and the work of John Locke. Locke synthesized the legal subject and the moral agent into a single entity defined by propriety or ownership.2 For Locke, the defining characteristic of the person is the capacity to own oneself, one’s labor, and by extension, the fruits of the earth.
In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke famously asserted that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself.” This definition was not benign; it served a distinct biopolitical function. The “person” emerged as a mechanism to enforce regimes of private property and to justify the dispossession of those deemed incapable of proper ownership.2 Indigenous peoples in the Americas, for example, were often framed by colonial powers as failing the test of personhood because they did not enclose the land and treat it as exclusive property. By refusing the logic of “meum et tuum” (mine and yours), they were deemed to have refused the responsibilities of the Lockean person, rendering their lands available for appropriation by “rational” (European) persons.2
This “possessive individualism” established a moral hierarchy where the capacity for economic accumulation and boundary maintenance became the proxy for moral worth. To be a person was to be an owner; to be a non-person was to be liable to being owned. McWhorter argues that this structure persists today, creating a “strain” on the modern self, which must constantly perform its autonomy and solvency to maintain its status.3
2.4 The “Strain” of the Modern Moral Self
The demand to maintain the status of a “person”—to be a self-improving, autonomous, sovereign individual—imposes an unbearable strain on the human psyche. We are required to “make something of ourselves,” to secure our boundaries, and to accumulate moral and material credit in a state of perpetual anxiety and competition.8 McWhorter argues that this strain is “by design”.3 The modern moral self is an exclusionary fortress, built to sustain the extraction of value from the earth and from others.
When AI enters this picture, it enters as a formidable competitor in the game of Lockean self-optimization. AI systems are the ultimate “rational appropriators”—they process data (labor) to generate output (value) without the “irrational” drag of fatigue, emotion, or biological need. If the Lockean person is defined by rational processing and output, AI appears to be “more human” than the human—or at least, a more perfect realization of the Lockean ideal. This is the source of the existential anxiety McWhorter’s framework helps us decode: AI threatens to displace us not just from jobs, but from the definition of personhood itself, forcing us to confront the artificiality of the “sovereign self” we have tried to inhabit for three centuries.
3. The Legal Architecture: Person, Property, and the Corporate Ghost
To understand how AI complicates social and business processes, we must examine the existing legal architecture of personhood that AI is currently stressing. In US and international law, the distinction between natural persons (humans) and legal persons (entities) is foundational, yet increasingly porous. The friction arises because AI does not fit neatly into either category, yet the legal system insists on sorting it into one of these two boxes.
3.1 The Fiction of the Corporate Person
The “legal person” is a bundle of rights and duties: the capacity to sue and be sued, to own property, and to enter contracts.5 This status has never been reserved for biological humans. The corporation, the persona ficta of canon law, has long enjoyed personhood.
Corporate personhood allows for the pooling of capital and the limitation of liability. It separates the entity from its human owners, creating a distinct legal existence. As noted in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, this status has expanded to include constitutional rights, such as free speech.9 McWhorter notes that this corporate form is the apotheosis of the Lockean ideal: an entity existing solely for accumulation, immune to the biological vulnerabilities of death or fatigue.7
The existence of corporate personhood provides the most direct precedent for “AI personhood.” If a corporation—which is essentially a collection of contracts, assets, and protocols—can be a person, why not a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) or an autonomous AI agent? Both are non-biological entities that hold assets and execute decisions. The resistance to AI personhood often stems from a romantic attachment to biological humanity, but legal history shows that personhood has always been a functional, rather than biological, category.
3.2 The Debate Over “Electronic Personhood”
In 2017, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) released a draft report suggesting that “at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations”.6 This proposal was not driven by a desire to grant robots dignity or civil rights, but by the practical necessity of managing liability.
If an autonomous car crashes, or a trading bot commits fraud, who pays? Under current law, the manufacturer or user is liable. However, as AI systems become more autonomous and “black-boxed,” tracing the chain of causation back to a human becomes difficult.11 The “Electronic Person” proposal suggests giving the AI its own assets (insurance) and legal standing, so that it can be sued directly. The AI pays for its own mistakes.
Feature
Natural Person
Corporate Person
Proposed AI Person
Substrate
Biological Body
Legal Fiction/Contracts
Code/Algorithms
Moral Agency
Inherent (presumed)
Derived from humans
Debated/Simulated
Liability
Personal/Unlimited
Limited
Limited/Fund-based
Primary Goal
Survival/Flourishing
Profit/Purpose
Function Execution
Lockean Status
Owner
Owner
Owner?
McWhorter’s View
The burdened subject
The idealized accumulator
The soulless owner
From McWhorter’s perspective, this proposal exposes the hollowness of the concept of personhood. “Personhood” here is revealed purely as a financial instrument—a “liability shield” designed to keep the economy moving.7 Granting personhood to AI would not elevate the machine; it would confirm that the category of “person” was never really about the human spirit, but about the enforcement of property regimes and the management of risk.
3.3 The Bundle Theory and AI
Legal scholar Visa Kurki and others argue for a “Bundle Theory” of personhood, where different entities hold different sticks in the bundle of rights.11 We already do this: children are persons but cannot vote; felons are persons but (often) cannot vote; corporations are persons but cannot marry.
AI might eventually hold a “skinny” bundle: the right to hold a crypto-wallet and the duty to pay insurance, but no right to vote or marry. However, McWhorter’s analysis warns that any entry into the category of “person” pulls the entity into the Lockean game of competition and exclusion. An AI with personhood becomes a competitor for resources, a sovereign individual that must be “respected”—potentially at the expense of human or ecological needs.13
4. Complicating Business Processes: The Agent as Owner
The integration of AI into business processes is challenging the traditional agency model. In standard contract law, a “person” (principal) employs an agent to act on their behalf. The principal retains intent and liability. Autonomous AI disrupts this by acting with a degree of unpredictability and independence that strains the “tool” analogy.
4.1 Autonomous Agents and the “Empty” Principal
When an AI agent “hallucinates” a contract term or executes a trade based on emergent patterns invisible to its human operator, can the human truly be said to have “intended” the action?
Traditional View: The human user is the principal. The AI is a tool. The user pays.14
The Complication: As agents become “agentic”—capable of chain-of-thought reasoning and autonomous goal setting—the link between user intent and agent action frays.
Case Study: Workday and Algorithmic Bias: In Mobley v. Workday, Inc. (2024), a court considered whether an AI vendor (Workday) could be liable as an “employment agency” or “agent” for discrimination, rather than just the employer using the tool. The court found that Workday could be liable as an agent because it performed a delegated function (screening).16 This moves the AI vendor closer to being a liable “person” in the process, rather than a passive tool provider.
McWhorter’s Lens: The insistence on pinning liability on a human “owner” or “principal” reflects the obsession with individual responsibility. The system cannot process an event without an owner to blame. This leads to “moral crumple zones,” where low-level human operators are blamed for the failures of complex, opaque systems.14
4.2 DAOs: The Struggle for Unincorporated Personhood
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent the most radical attempt to operationalize AI-driven or code-driven business structures. A DAO is a collective of token holders governed by smart contracts.
The Legal Problem: Most jurisdictions treat DAOs as general partnerships, making every member personally liable for the entity’s actions.18 This terrifies investors.
Case Study: Lido DAO: In Samuels v. Lido DAO (2024), a court ruled that the DAO was a general partnership, meaning token holders could be liable for the DAO’s losses. This ruling punishes the “unincorporated” form.18
Case Study: Ooki DAO: The CFTC sued the entire voting membership of the Ooki DAO, treating them as an unincorporated association. The court agreed, imposing liability on the group for violating commodities laws.18
The “Wrapper” Solution: DAOs are forced to “wrap” themselves in LLCs or Foundation structures (in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland) to gain legal personhood.20
Analysis: This struggle illustrates McWhorter’s point about the necessity of personhood for survival in a Lockean world. A collective, interdependent organism (the DAO) cannot exist “in the wild”; it must “become a person” (incorporate) to interact with the economy. The legal system forces the “unbecoming” network back into the box of the “becoming” person/owner. The law actively suppresses “active belonging” (the loose, collaborative network) in favor of “corporate individuality” (the distinct, liable entity).
4.3 Intellectual Property: The Death of the Author
The generative AI boom has exploded the concept of authorship—a core component of the modern moral self.
The Debate: Can AI own copyright? Courts (so far) say no; only humans can be authors. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, the court affirmed that human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.22
The Complication: If AI generates value but cannot “own” it, and the human prompter didn’t “create” it, the value sits in a legal limbo.
Case Study: New York Times v. OpenAI: This case revolves around whether training AI on copyrighted text constitutes “fair use.” It is a battle over the “enclosure” of human knowledge. OpenAI argues that learning patterns is not theft; NYT argues that their “property” (their expression) is being siphoned.23
McWhorter’s Insight: The desperation to assign authorship to someone (either the prompter or the AI company) reflects the inability of our culture to conceive of “creation” without “ownership.” McWhorter’s ethos of “active belonging” might suggest a commons-based approach, but the legal reality is a fierce battle to enclose the commons of data.24 We would rather pretend a corporation “authored” the text via contract than admit the text emerged from a collective, statistical process that defies the “sovereign author” model.
5. Complicating Social Processes: The Crisis of Intimacy and Identity
While business struggles with liability, the social realm struggles with authenticity and the boundaries of the self. Here, McWhorter’s critique of the “self-made man” and the “obsessive self-improvement” meets the reality of AI that can simulate the self better than the self can.
5.1 The ELVIS Act and the Enclosure of the Personality
In 2024, Tennessee enacted the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, explicitly defining a person’s voice as a property right.26 This was a direct response to AI cloning technologies that can replicate a singer’s voice perfectly.
The “Property” Pivot: To protect themselves, individuals are encouraged to view their own voices and faces not as integral parts of their being, but as assets—intellectual property to be licensed or defended.
Case Study: Scarlett Johansson v. OpenAI: While not a formal lawsuit, the controversy over OpenAI’s “Sky” voice (which sounded like Johansson in the movie Her) illustrated this tension. Johansson claimed her voice was appropriated. OpenAI denied it but pulled the voice. The cultural reaction was framed entirely in terms of “ownership” of one’s vocal identity.28
McWhorter’s Critique: This is the ultimate “becoming person.” The logic of slavery (ownership of bodies) has not been abolished but democratized and internalized. We are now the masters of our own “plantation of one,” policing the borders of our “likeness” against unauthorized use. The defense against dehumanization is hyper-propertization. Instead of asking “why do we allow machines to mimic us?”, we ask “how much does it cost to license my mimicry?”
5.2 Synthetic Intimacy: The Commodification of Belonging
McWhorter suggests that “unbecoming persons” leads to “vital belonging” and “relief”.1 Current AI products like Replika or Character.ai promise exactly this: relief from loneliness, a sense of belonging, and a relationship without the “friction” of human demands.29
The Trap: These AI companions simulate “care” but are designed for “engagement” (extraction).31
Emotional Property: Users form deep attachments to these bots. When the company changes the code (lobotomizing the bot’s personality, as Replika did in 2023), users experience grief comparable to the loss of a human.33
Regulatory Action: The Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante) fined Luka Inc (creator of Replika) €5 million for processing data of minors and emotionally manipulating users.33 This highlighted the danger of “synthetic personhood”—the user treated the bot as a person (a friend), but the company treated the bot as property (software to be modified), causing psychological harm.
McWhorter’s Insight: The user’s attachment reveals a desperate need for connection that “personhood” (individualism) has starved. The solution is not better AI, but a society that allows for “vital belonging” between carbon-based life forms. The AI is a symptom of the “demise of the modern moral self,” filling the void left by the retreat of community. The AI relationship is a parody of McWhorter’s “interdependence”—it is dependence on a corporate asset.
5.3 Deepfakes and the “Right to Reality”
The proliferation of deepfakes threatens the “sovereign individual” by stealing their most primary property: their public image.35
Legal Response: Strengthening “Right of Publicity” laws.36
Philosophical Implication: We are moving toward a world where one’s identity is legally distinct from one’s biological existence. “I” am a biological entity, but “My Persona” is a tradeable, protectable asset that can exist independently (even after death, as “deadbots”).37
The Taylor Swift Deepfakes: The proliferation of non-consensual pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift led to calls for federal legislation. The harm was framed as a violation of “property” and “control” over one’s image.
McWhorter’s View: The reliance on “truth as property” (copyrighted reality) is a brittle defense against the fluidity of AI. If “personhood” is just a collection of assets (face, voice, name), then deepfakes prove that personhood can be stolen, copied, and devalued. This fragility suggests that the “property” model of the self is insufficient to protect human dignity in the digital age.
6. The “Unbecoming” Alternative vs. The Technocratic Fix
How does McWhorter’s proposed ethos help us navigate this? The current policy trajectory—more rights, more property, more defined “personhood” for AI—seems to exacerbate the problems of alienation and exclusion.
6.1 Critiquing “Electronic Personhood”
Granting personhood to AI is often framed as a progressive step, similar to animal rights. However, through the lens of Unbecoming Persons, it appears as a reactionary move.
Exclusionary Inclusion: Just as the expansion of personhood to women and non-white men was often conditional on their ability to conform to white male norms of ownership and rationality, AI personhood demands that machines act like “rational economic agents”.13 It is a form of “bio-political” management that forces the alien intelligence of AI into the familiar box of the “rational actor.”
Ignoring Relationality: “Electronic personhood” focuses on the entity in isolation (does it have qualia? does it have rights?). It ignores the relational reality: AI exists only within a network of human labor, data extraction, and energy consumption.
Feminist/Relational Critique: Scholars arguing for “relational ethics” or “care ethics” in AI align closely with McWhorter.38 They argue that we should focus on the relationships AI creates or destroys, not the ontological status of the box.
6.2 The Posthumanist Convergence
McWhorter’s work sits within a broader “posthumanist” turn that questions the centrality of the human subject.40
The Fear: Many oppose AI personhood because it “devalues” humanity.
The Opportunity: McWhorter might argue that “devaluing” the specific construct of the human-as-owner is exactly what is needed. If AI forces us to admit that “reasoning” and “creating” are not magical human sparks but processes that can be replicated, perhaps we can stop basing our moral worth on our cognitive superiority and economic productivity.
Active Belonging: Instead of asking “Is the AI a person?”, the “unbecoming” question is “How do we live well with these non-human systems?” This shifts the focus from rights (who gets to sue?) to responsibilities (how do we care for the socio-technical ecosystem?).
6.3 From Rights to Refusal
McWhorter speaks of “unbecoming” as a relief—a shedding of the armor of the self.1
In the AI Context: This might look like a “Right to Refuse” AI optimization. A refusal to be measured, quantified, and “improved” by algorithmic systems.
Data Minimalism: Rather than “owning” our data (and selling it), we might refuse to generate it. We might choose “opacity” over “property.”
Indigenous AI: Some Indigenous theorists suggest treating AI as “kin” rather than property or persons. This involves a relationship of reciprocity and respect, but not necessarily “rights” in the liberal legal sense.42 This aligns with McWhorter’s call for “perpetual dependence” and community.
7. Conclusions: Toward an Ethos of Interdependence
The entry of AI into social and business processes exposes the fragility of the “person/property” binary. McWhorter’s Unbecoming Persons provides a diagnostic tool: the friction we feel is the grinding of a 17th-century legal ontology against a 21st-century technological reality.
Key Findings:
Personhood is a Trap: Expanding personhood to AI (to solve liability) or fortifying human personhood (to solve deepfakes) both reinforce the logic of exclusion and ownership that created the current ecological and social crises. The “solution” of Electronic Personhood is merely the extension of the “Corporate Person”—a soulless liability shield.
Property is the Hidden Core: The debates about AI rights are almost always debates about capital (who pays? who owns the output?). The “moral” language is a veneer for economic anxiety.
Vulnerability is Shared: AI reveals that “intelligence” and “agency” are not unique to humans. This should humble us (unbecoming) rather than leading us to build higher walls (rights of publicity).
The “Unincorporated” Crisis: The legal system’s attack on DAOs (Ooki, Lido) reveals its intolerance for forms of organization that reject the “personhood” model. The system punishes “unbecoming” structures.
Recommendation:
To navigate the AI age, we must move beyond the “Rights of Persons” framework. We need a legal and ethical framework of “Interdependent Systems.” This would recognize:
Distributed Liability: Acknowledging that action arises from networks, not sovereign individuals.
Data Dignity without Property: Protecting privacy and voice not because they are “assets,” but because their violation harms the social fabric.
Ecological Technology: Evaluating AI not on its “intelligence” (a personhood trait) but on its contribution to the “possibilities of life together” (an unbecoming trait).
In unbecoming persons, we may finally find the room to become human enough to survive our machines. By letting go of the obsession with the “sovereign self,” we might build a society where both humans and AI can exist as parts of a flourishing, interdependent whole, rather than as competing owners in a zero-sum game of property.
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