Meta-Worse, a lawyer’s mega paradise

Abstract

Imagine you are taking a stroll in the virtual city of Meta-Worse1 when you meet John Lennon. John has not been brought back to life, as you have probably guessed; this entity is an avatar that exactly replicates Lennon’s appearance and voice. John tells you that he has transformed the genome sequence of the influenza virus into a song that is available on the Rarible platform as a non-fungible token (NFT). You recall that there is an unauthorized minting of NFTs relating to the same song on another platform. You have also started your own collection of NFT artworks in your virtual ‘home’. Many buyers of NFT artworks are complaining they were unaware what intellectual property rights have been accorded them by their purchase of these NFT artworks. You then visit a clothing store. Jay, an AI-powered sales assistant avatar that has the gift of gab and can respond to human speech, persuades you to purchase a Nike shirt. A call comes in, and you leave the purchasing decision to your personal AI-avatar, which shares your biometrics data with the sales assistant. Unbeknown to you, the shirt is a counterfeit. Passing by the virtual red light district, you see that workers in many of the virtual adult theatres are wearing the same Nike shirt, prompting you to conclude that Nike is a major sponsor of these establishments. You take a picture and post this on your real-world Instagram, where you have over 1 million followers. You cannot get over the excitement of meeting John, so you instruct your AI-avatar to create a doctored video clip, in which John appears to be swearing while singing, to keep yourself entertained. Your Meta-Worse account is hacked, and the clip is now shared with audiences on all the major meta-platforms and in the real world. The video itself is then tokenized and sold as an NFT by anonymous digital thieves without your permission. As Brian Eno has facetiously remarked in this context: ‘Right now, I mainly see (NFTs) hustlers looking for suckers’.2 Welcome to Meta-Worse. In terms of technical advancement and human behaviour and interaction, cities like Meta-Worse are providing hitherto unimaginable opportunities for transformation and perhaps even progress. Yet, the metaverse has simultaneously created a lawyer’s mega paradise. It raises fundamental questions related to privacy, deception, misinformation, non-consensual pornography, image rights, deepfakes, defamation, algorithmic transparency, anonymity and authenticity. These issues cluster around a single foundational dilemma: who is liable for what? Such difficulties are only amplified by the increasing complexity and interdependency of AI systems. This phenomenon, in turn, means it is becoming harder to assign legal responsibility to avatar owners, software coders and metaverse operators, all of whom may have varying degrees of control over the AI systems in question. Full disclosure and transparency form the foundations of liberal democracies. With digital platforms now inextricably linked to our society’s infrastructure, it is time to abandon secrecy and mystery in favour of transparency. Open, transparent, fair and accountable algorithm decision-making processes must now underpin the operating principles set for and by platforms and policymakers. After all, from a legal perspective, it is we humans who will ultimately have to bear the costs. We must now devise tools and systems to internalize these costs and regulate ex-ante. For instance, human approval should be made mandatory in certain settings in which AI-avatars are deployed, for example, in digital health services or virtual commercial transactions. Platforms should clearly set out consent policies for data-sharing. Additionally, metaverse users should be informed whether their interactions are taking place with a human-controlled or AI-powered avatar. In sum, the city of Meta-Worse demands an entirely new type of legal infrastructure. This parallel judicial universe, an independent meta-system with its own virtual jurisdiction, is nothing less, in fact, than an entirely new legal order. As such, it is tasked with regulating meta ‘governments’ and ‘constitutions’ with a direct impact on billions of people around the world. It follows that any operating policies or procedures that platforms develop in the digital universe have the potential to become international legal conventions and norm-setting principles, not unlike a form of soft law. In Meta-Worse, platforms now act as legislators, promulgating regulations and procedures on fundamental rights, which have a global impact and legal footprint.3 Digital due process is now urgently required or, in the inimitable words of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ‘what the online world needs now is a Magna Carta for the world wide web’.