Tawia B. Ansah (Florida International University College of Law) has posted Beyond the Artifact Fallacy: AI as a Relational Milieu on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Legal doctrine and public regulation overwhelmingly treat artificial intelligence as either a sophisticated mathematical tool or an incipient digital mind. This conceptual framing traps law within a substance ontology that reifies a distributed, continuously process into a discrete object. This artifact fallacy functions as an ideological decoy: by directing legal attention toward posthoc outputs, individual consent, and ex post liability, it allows the true nature of AI—as a continuous, metabolic, and metastable assemblage—to evade structural oversight, insulating the concentrated corporate infrastructures that control its computational flow.
This Article advances a process-ontological alternative. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation and the associated milieu, it re-theorizes artificial intelligence not as an isolated artifact, but as a relational medium. Under this framework, computational systems do not operate as standalone products within a static background; rather, they continuously modulate and are modulated by the technical, institutional, and environmental milieus in which they are embedded.
By diagnosing the artifact fallacy, the Article explains why existing doctrinal remedies inevitably fail when applied to dynamic optimization models across loss landscapes. In place of entity-based oversight, the Article establishes a process ontology for technology law, laying the theoretical foundation for anticipatory, scale-sensitive legal governance.
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Lawrence Solum