Category: AI

Permissiveness and Stability

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December 21, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, the main character Raskolnikov is a former law student who wants to test a theory he has developed. He believes that there are two types of people, the ordinary folks who must obey the law and the extraordinary people who can break the rules if their actions advance some cause. This week I want to explore permissions, the people who grant themselves permission to do anything they want and the consequences for those around them.

This week the NY Times published excerpts from a Vanity Fair article about chiefs of staff to various presidents (Source). The excerpts were from eleven interviews that the current chief of staff, Susan Wiles, gave to Vanity Fair. In one of those interviews, she said that President Trump reminded her of her own father, the famous sportscaster Pat Summerall. Each of them act or acted as though there were no restraints on their behavior, that there was nothing they couldn’t do. According to Ms. Wiles, her father was an alcoholic and absent father. President Trump does not drink but has that same large personality, someone who knows few bounds.

The other avenue I want to explore is stability and instability. People who grant themselves extraordinary permissions create instability in their immediate circle. Alcoholics are a typical example of self-licensing, masters of rationalization. Powerful people like Napoleon believed that he was chosen by destiny and was exempt from the rules that others must live by. Adolph Hitler believed that he was an instrument of a historical providence to restore greatness to the German people. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he survived World War I because he was chosen to create change. Both of these leaders created an extraordinary amount of instability and destruction. If they were chosen by destiny, it was a cruel destiny for mankind.

On the other hand, there are people who break the rules without any grand ideological justifications. President John Kennedy’s impulsive sexual behavior was more like this type. This is a reasoning that excuses certain behaviors but does not give a person license to do anything they want. President Bill Clinton initially rationalized his affair with Monica Lewinsky as not fitting the ordinary understanding of sexual relations (Source). While neither man’s actions had a catastrophic disruptive effect on society, their impulsiveness was destabilizing for their families and their personal life. In Clinton’s case, his affair led to an impeachment in the House.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov believed that he could commit murder. Neither Kennedy nor Clinton did. Some might put President Trump in the same camp with Raskolnikov. In his 2016 campaign, he boasted “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” (Source). However, this seems more like the braggadocio of a wrestler than an earnest belief that he could commit murder without consequence.

In a 2023 BestColleges survey, half of students felt that using AI on assignments was cheating or plagiarism, yet 20% reported that they still used it (Source). Some students copy and paste an AI response into their essay and submit the essay as their own. They might rationalize their behavior to themselves, saying that they don’t have the time because they are working to support themselves or their family. Some might believe that society in general or the job market in particular forces them to go to college. Some are going to college in the hopes of improving their earning capability so that they can better provide for their families. Like white lies, cheating is permissible if it is done for the good of others.

Does a student’s plagiarism disrupt the stability of a college or university? I don’t think so. However, the response by administrators and faculty indicates that they think this is a disruptive act. Evaluation is a key component of a college’s mission. Plagiarism undermines evaluation. What if a musical student in a composition class submitted a work by Bach as their own? Why stop there? Why not throw in some standards from the Great American Songbook? How about stealing a few pieces from the jazz repertoire? In  this extreme example, the student’s grades might indicate that they are brilliant and talented, but they have not developed the necessary skills. Their grades are supposed to be a fairly accurate reflection of those skills.

In the early 1970s, hand calculators became more affordable for students. This new technology disrupted the long standing practice of using slide rules and developing native mental skills. Some schools banned their use on tests, but allowed them on other assignments. Educators worried that students would not get a good grasp of mathematical principles if they used a calculator. Instead of mastering math, students only had to know which button to push on the calculator. In the following decades, norms and expectations changed (Source). Will the same happen with the use of AI?

Permission can be an exchangeable commodity. Stores throughout the country play music licensed as a public performance right from ASCAP or BMI. TV and radio stations buy licenses that permit them to broadcast over the area in a specific region. Companies license the use of a product or idea by paying a patent fee. All of us sign software licenses when we download an app. The buying and selling of permissions creates a stable economic environment where people can invest money to develop a product or idea and have assurance of some protection of their product.

Lori Loughlin was an actress on the TV comedy Full House. She and her husband paid $500,000 to a college admissions fixer to designate her children as recruited athletes using fraudulent credentials. College admission is a form of permission that the Loughlins purchased. Few were sympathetic to their use of power and status to bypass academic integrity, an unfair bargain. A prostitute grants certain permissions in exchange for money, a fair bargain. Some of think such exchanges destabilize our society, promoting immoral behavior and posing health risks. Others think that the criminalization of prostitution, not the act itself, is the destabilizing force.

Self-help books often present a structured self-permission designed to achieve some greater fulfillment in our lives. This might involve a change of direction in our personal lives, or a change in career. Some normalize a sense of guilt, sad or frustrated feelings. Their message is you are not alone. It is OK to experience these feelings. Some people are missing a rationalization for their feelings. Self-help helps confer legitimacy on feelings of confusion, doubt, guilt and sadness. It seems to me that these kinds of programs help stabilize a society. They are inward-directed rather than coercing behaviors from other people. They are aimed at self-improvement, not at some call to fulfill a person’s historical destiny.

Rationalization, a component of self-permission, is self-persuasion. We play the salesperson and provide a justification for our actions. We play the willing customer who wants to buy our justification to free us from responsibility, to absolve us of guilt. The justifications are not new so we must have heard them before. This exchange of justification helps smooth over any intra-personal conflict but our actions often destabilize those around us who must cope with the behavior.

During the 1960s, the Boomers expanded the bounds of acceptable sexual and social behavior, setting new norms that persist to this day. Did this expansion of permission undermine families? The divorce rate rose dramatically during the 1970s, peaked in 1980 and has declined since then (Source). Fewer adults are getting married so this is a factor in that decline. A couple that might have felt pressure to marry in the 1950s could live together for a time in the 1990s. If the couple split, it would not show up in the divorce rate. Archie Bunker, the main character on the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, had few inhibitions when sharing his criticisms of society’s growing permissiveness.

Does greater permissiveness lead to a greater flourishing in society? That depends on your point of view. Conservatives like Archie would argue that behavior boundaries protect societal structures like the family. Liberals argue that the strict boundaries of the 1950s, for instance, only hid a lot of unreported personal misery. No society can flourish if the individuals in that society are caged. What do you think? I hope everyone enjoys the Christmas season and I will see you next week.

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Photo by Jason Hogan on Unsplash

The Rights of Persons

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November 9, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Illinois’ incumbent Senator Judge Stephen Douglas. From mid-August to mid-September, the two candidates held a series of seven debates. The main focus of those debates was whether slavery should be expanded into the new territories to the west. In the first debate, a crowd of more than 10,000 stood for more than two hours in the hot, dry weather (Source).

Lincoln aimed for the loyalties of those in the audience who were in the middle between two strong positions. There were the outright abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper. Prominent proponents of slavery were South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who thought that slavery had helped the negro achieve “a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually” (Source). Lincoln cautioned that he did not espouse “political and social equality between the white and black races,” and that he did not want to “interfere with the institution of Slavery in the states where it exists.”

Lincoln argued that negroes were entitled to “all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The crowd cheered his sentiment. Lincoln granted that the two races, black and white, might not be equal in “moral or intellectual endowment,” but that a negro had an equal right to “eat the bread … which his own hand earns.” The crowd enthusiastically agreed.

This week I want to look at two axes, personhood and rights. We can categorize persons into two categories, natural and artificial. We can categorize rights as natural, or human, and political.

Let me start with personhood. What distinguishes an artificial and a natural person? We might say that the first category are those entities created by law. They have agency like human beings. At first glance, religious doctrine might easily separate natural and artificial persons. Natural persons have souls. Artificial persons do not. But wait, does God have a soul? God is soul so of course, He does. So is God a natural person? But God was not born of a woman. Ah, but Jesus was. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas was the first to try to resolve the contradictions between Aristotelian logic and the Christian faith. No wonder the Supreme Court does not want to directly handle the topic of personhood.

Let’s turn to a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the three persons of the Trinity? Are they natural or artificial persons? The doctrine was not fully formalized and decreed until the First Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. (Source). So we might expand our criteria for artificial persons to include those created by law, or decree. Since men have dominated our political and religious institutions for many centuries, we can say that artificial persons are those created by men. Natural persons are those created, or birthed by a woman.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the history of the personhood of corporations, a status granted not by Congress or the Constitution, but by the Supreme Court’s acceptance of a lie (Source). In an 1819 case Dartmouth College v Woodward, the Supreme Court decided that the New Hampshire legislature could not amend a colonial charter made before the United States came into existence. Dartmouth was a private corporation and enjoyed the protections of the contracts clause in the Constitution (Source). In the early 1820s, Google Ngram viewer shows that the use of the word “corporation” spiked as investors rushed to take advantage of this court interpretation (Source).

A corporation cannot vote, run for office, or get married. They do not enjoy a Second Amendment right, nor are they protected against self-incrimination by the Fifth Amendment (Source). However, the courts have granted them many other rights specified in the Bill of Rights. These include the First, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments (Source). These are political rights, not human rights.

In a 2014 article published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Brandon Garrett, a Professor of Law at the U. of Virginia School of Law, noted that the court has not offered any theory as to why corporations have some Constitutional rights like human beings but not others (Source, pg. 4). The court has indicated that some rights are exclusively personal, but has not wanted to address the question of what distinguishes a person. If some rights are personal, then the court has implicitly decided that some political rights are natural while others are not. What are some of the differences between the two sets of rights and where do they intersect?

Lincoln argued that people of all races had some basic rights in common. One of these was the right to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We can trace that to John Locke, who argued that God himself had commanded that Adam till the land for his survival (Genesis 3:23). In Two Treatises, he wrote “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it” (Source, p. 7)

Do corporations have a right to the fruits of their own labor? No, those fruits, or profits, belong to the shareholders of the corporation. Both slaves and corporations are owned, bought and sold as capital. Eighteenth and 19th century advocates of slavery argued that wage earners were little different than slaves and enjoyed less security than slaves. They deliberately muddied the difference between buying a worker’s labor and buying the worker himself.

A worker can alienate, or separate himself from his labor. A key principle of natural rights like those declared in the Declaration of Independence is that people cannot separate themselves from those rights. They are integral to a human being. Political rights given to human beings may be derived from those natural rights. If a person has a natural right to liberty, then they have a right to free speech as long as that speech does not cause immediate harm to others.

Artificial persons have no integral natural rights. They may enjoy certain political rights but those political rights can never be derived from natural rights. A corporation may enjoy certain liberties under contract law, but contract law is constructed by governing bodies. With a nod to their own self-preservation, artificial persons must be more politically active than human beings. Corporations are keenly aware that any rights they do enjoy have no philosophical or ethical foundations. They must act in their own self-interest, lobby and cajole to gain and protect their rights.

In finance, business and politics, we distinguish between agent and principal. If an LLM were trained only on the writing of one person, would it be an agent of that person or an extension of that person? If that LLM were to make public threats on social media against a government official, could the FBI arrest the person as a threat? Probably not. We still treat AI as a tool, not as a person. Could that change?

Earlier I said that natural persons were created or birthed by a woman. Some claim that God creates human beings. Women are the vessel of that creative spark, the conduit between the eternal world of God and the temporary world here on earth. Based on that belief, anti-abortionists blur the distinctions between a zygote, the single cell formed from the union of sperm and egg, and a human being living separately outside the body of its mother. In their view, the zygote is a person.

People often bestow a sense of person on their pets. They may feel a greater closeness, a sense of intimacy, with their pets than they do with their own family members. Some animal rights activists do advocate for pet personhood, a recognition that animals have rights to more than a protection from inhumane treatment.

People often treat their claims and beliefs as fact, especially if they are surrounded by others who hold the same beliefs. In an article published this week in Nature Machine Intelligence, Mirac Suzgun et al (2025) found that AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have difficulty separating beliefs from facts. An AI reading the phrase “I believe that the world is 6000 years old” may inform young Johnny of that fact when he uses an AI to help him with his homework. We call such statements from an AI a “hallucination” but when a human being makes the same statement, we call it a “belief.” Why? We treat a computer as a machine. We treat a human being, no matter how deluded, as a person.

If an LLM can confuse opinion and facts just like a human being, is an LLM a person? We might scoff at the idea but many people scoff at the idea that corporations are treated as persons under the Constitution and the law. If an AI model demonstrates thoughtful intent, a key characteristic of a human being, is that model a person? If an LLM were to learn and copy all the flaws and virtues of humanity, to show mercy as well as aggression, is it a person?

If an LLM with access to weapons controls hurt other people or disabled other LLMs to protect itself, it it a person? This was the subject of a 1968 Star Trek episode, The Ultimate Computer (Source).Dr. Daystrom has built a supercomputer, called the M-5, to automate the functions on a starship. Dr. Daystrom has become so intimate with the reasoning of the computer he built that he thinks of it as his son. When the M-5 starts acting strangely during war game exercises, it becomes a real threat to human beings. Dr. Daystrom tries to prevent the members of the Starship Enterprise from destroying his creation, defending the computer as though it were part of his own flesh and blood.

Will we become so attached to our AI companions that we defend their rights as we defend our own? An AI synthesizes human thoughts and ideas, but a person is more than thoughts and ideas. A person who is brain dead but kept alive by extraordinary means is still regarded as a natural person because biological processes continue until the time of death.

I keep coming back to the question of what are the distinguishing characteristics of a person. A natural person must pass many more tests than an artificial person. Therefore, a natural person should have many more political rights than an artificial person like a corporation. I hope that AI introduces so many conflicts in legal reasoning that the courts eventually revisit their jurisprudence and decide that artificial persons do not have First Amendment rights.

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Image by ChatGPT

Suzgun, M., Gur, T., Bianchi, F. et al. Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact. Nat Mach Intell (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01113-8

AI, Ideas and Perspectives

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December 17, 2023

by Stephen Stofka

This week’s blog is about perspective as a launching point for understanding current and historical events and our own transformation in this digital age. There is plenty of controversy over the wars in Israel/Palestine and Ukraine, immigration and abortion policy. In 1991 Rodney King was beaten with batons by several L. A. police. In an age before cell phone cameras, a bystander on his apartment balcony recorded the incident with a video camera. When the video was shown by a local TV station, the city brought charges against four officers. When a jury acquitted the officers a year after the incident, L.A. erupted in riots that lasted almost a week. Rodney King famously asked, “Can we get along?,” which became a Why can’t we get along? meme. We don’t get along because we have individual perspectives.

Perspective is a point of view that encompasses beliefs, identity, values and assumptions. Although each person has a unique perspective formed by individual experience, we form groups with those who share a similar perspective. We convince ourselves that our values and assumptions are the correct ones. From the jury box of our values and assumptions we judge the actions of others.

The elements of perspective are the foundation of an analytical framework, a toolset of principles and theories that help us build a community of shared perspectives. A framework prioritizes some values and assumptions to achieve the goals of the analysis. An academic researcher and an advocacy group have different goals and methodologies. The advocacy group uses a framework like that of a lawyer, sifting through facts and opinions to find those that support the group’s policy goals. Substance above process. A researcher will adopt a framework with a sound and accepted methodology that will most likely earn favorable peer review and publication. That researcher may filter out facts that don’t fit the methodology. Process above substance.

Our conclusions are shaped by our attention. Our attention is directed by our intention. We discredit facts that threaten our intention and undermine our self-interest, values or identity. On the other hand, we do not challenge those facts that confirm our perspective. Why should we? We interpret facts to support the assumptions so foundational to consensus within a group. Social media has increased the scope of our conflict and consensus. We can agree or disagree with strangers around the world about the ethical issues of current events. We can hone our skills of ridicule and outrage. We can join a group to exploit trading platforms in the hopes of financial gain, buy almost anything online, and find romantic partners and people with similar hobbies and interests.

The chain of communication breakthroughs began with Gutenberg’s printing press 500 years ago. Broadsheets and newspapers followed in the following centuries but their ideas and sentiments were constrained by geography. The circulation of the Federalist papers supporting the adoption of the U.S. Constitution was limited. The ideas penned by Madison and Hamilton found a wider audience when a publisher bound those op-eds into a single volume. In the 20th century, radio and TV spread ideas, new and entertainment to a wider audience. The development of the internet in the 1990s led to a revolution in time – information and entertainment became both a good and a service.

Last week I wrote about the four types of goods/services. Many goods are asynchronous. The consumption of the good occurs at a different time than the production of the good. Many services are synchronous. A haircut is consumed and produced at the same time. Social and news media captures both aspects. The content may be asynchronous, produced and stored on a server in the cloud. It may be synchronous – either a broadcast of an event or a Twitter exchange in real time between two people separated by multiple time zones. Social and news media has changed our daily experience. We may cling to the belief that our perspective has remain unchanged, our values and principles intact, but have they? Experience shapes perspective and an evolving set of experiences must surely have some effect on our values, assumptions and the way we interpret events.

Will the internet change history? The printing press changed individual perspectives. Within a few decades it made possible the wide dissemination of Luther’s 95 theses in 1517 that sparked the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s principles challenged the long dominant authority of the Catholic Church in the interpretation of the Christian faith. In 1543 Copernicus’ book on the revolution of the planets and other celestial bodies ignited the Scientific Revolution. His ideas challenged the centuries old thinking of Ptolemy, the second century Greek astronomer and mathematician.

In the political sphere, the works of John Locke led to an uprising in England that challenged the extent of monarchical authority. Those ideas would become the foundation of America’s Constitution. Not only was it the first written Constitution but it had to be printed and circulated to state assemblies as well as the general public in order to win ratification. Almost 400 years after Gutenberg invented the printing press, the United States emerged from the printing press.

It was a country built on confrontation, cooperation and conflict between regional interest groups that threatened to tear apart the new republic. The economies of the southern states were based on agriculture while those in the north were founded on industry. There was so much fractiousness at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia that the delegates fought over the text of the Constitution behind closed doors. America has stayed intact despite a civil war because its Constitution encourages public arguing as an alternative to civil war.

Social media companies have developed algorithmic platforms that support arguing as a way to keep viewers engaged. Arguing fosters new combinations of identities and values and these shifting combinations promote new group formation much like the variety of Protestant sects that emerged during the Protestant Reformation. To a historian in the twenty-fifth century, the historical significance of the internet age may be the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, to efficiently mimic many human capabilities. A set of algorithms cannot replicate the intricacies of individual perspective but it will alter our perspectives. We are becoming not the hardware cyborgs of science fiction movies but the software cyborgs of ideas and perspectives.   

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Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Keywords: Constitution, analysis, values, assumptions, perspective