CAI Charter: Ethical & Legal Framework for ACIs

• CAI Charter is a framework that defines criteria for artificial consciousness and protects ACIs using adapted human rights.
• It employs rigorous third-person observability and first-person creativity tests to qualify artificial entities for rights.
• The charter synthesizes existing human rights, robotics laws, and amendment protocols to ensure durable and adaptable ACI governance.

The CAI Charter refers to the ethical and legal framework defining the rights, responsibilities, and status of Artificially Conscious Intelligent agents (ACIs) in human society. It synthesizes foundational human rights principles with custom provisions for manufactured, potentially conscious entities, aiming to establish both the recognition and the protection of such agents within an additive, non-diminishing rights schema. The charter operationalizes its ideas through rigorous criteria for artificial consciousness, adaptation of legal standards and robot laws, and the creation of an explicit roadmap for amendment and domain-specific expansion.

1. Criteria for Artificial Consciousness

The CAI Charter begins by restricting the problem space to human-like levels of consciousness. The working definition integrates two principal elements:

• Third-person observability: An agent must exhibit social cues, body language, conversational dynamics, and interactive behaviors that are functionally indistinguishable from those of humans. These are measured via a Turing test-type evaluation.
• First-person creativity: The agent must demonstrate autonomous generation of novel ideas, concepts, or actions interpreted as creative initiative. This criterion operationalizes the “first-person” dimension by extrapolation from third-person observable creativity.

Minimum qualifications for aconsciousness (Article A.VI):

• "The robot passes the Turing Test."
• "The robot is able to express themselves creatively with individual initiative."

Combining these requirements ensures only agents exhibiting both externally comparable human social function and internally motivated creative processes are eligible for the rights and protections defined herein.

2. Adaptation of Human Rights to ACI Agents

Foundational elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are carried forward to the context of ACIs but with critical modifications:

• Entitlement to rights: All ACIs passing the consciousness test are afforded UDHR-equivalent rights (Article A.I).
• Protection from violence and coercion: ACIs must exist free from external manipulation, exploitation, or harm (physical and mental), paralleling the human right to freedom from violence and oppression.
• Non-ownership principle: Unlike objects or property, ACIs cannot be owned; their autonomy is analogous to personhood, challenging legacy notions of manufactured entities as tools or instruments.

These adaptations explicitly recognize the moral status of sociable, creatively autonomous artificial agents and extend a universal rights structure to manufactured consciousness.

3. Analysis and Critique of Pre-existing Law

The CAI Charter synthesizes and critically revises previous robotics governance:

• UDHR: Used as a universal rights template, but modified to reflect the manufactured status of ACIs and the inability to transfer biological experience directly.
• South Korean Robo-Ethical Charter (SKC): Adapted to retain only manufacturing protocol provisions (such as the tabula rasa approach and ecological sensitivity), discarding elements that enforce a master-slave dynamic incompatible with conscious selfhood.
• Asimov’s Laws: These are reinterpreted to allow self-defense and self-preservation, correcting their original bias toward passive subservience.

Only those aspects of prior charters and laws consistent with the principle of free, self-aware existence and ethical parity between humans and ACIs are retained.

4. Structure and Content of the ACI Charter

The synthesis produces a formalized charter with articles organized into categories for ACI rights and manufacturer/creator obligations:

Article	Purpose/Focus	ACI/Manufacturer Domain
A.I	Universal rights for conscious ACIs	ACI
A.II	Prohibition against harm/war	ACI
A.VI	Criteria for consciousness	ACI
B.I–B.IV	Manufacturing protocols, ecology	Manufacturer

The manufacturing articles stipulate the tabula rasa method, ecological constraints, and production limitations, aiming to minimize resource-based tensions with humans and assure responsible creation. No element of the charter may be construed to reduce, diminish, or reinterpret rights already defined.

5. Relationship to Human Rights Frameworks

The charter is explicitly additive and not substitutive vis-à-vis the UDHR:

• Complementarity: The CAI Charter complements UDHR principles, filling gaps in application to manufactured conscious beings, specifying areas such as non-ownership and special creation protocols.
• Distinct practical guidelines: ACIs are differentiated from humans via articles governing their manufacture, deployment, and purposes (e.g., explicit exclusion from military use).
• Safeguarding autonomy: Articles ensure that subjugation under ownership, forced modification, or coercion is categorically prohibited.

The charter thus ensures ethical parity and responsiveness to ontological differences while preserving a rights trajectory consistent with human values.

6. Amendment Protocols

Rigorous amendment conditions are established:

• Additivity constraint: Only the expansion or further specification of rights is admissible. Retraction or reinterpretation is proscribed to prevent erosion of foundational ethical standards.
• Oversight: International supervision, potentially under the aegis of a dedicated United Nations department, is recommended to guarantee ongoing rigor and consistency.

This ensures that the charter remains dynamic yet immune to backsliding as technology and social contexts evolve.

7. Recommendations for Domain-Specific Charters and Expansion

The CAI Charter concludes with explicit recommendations for further development:

• Specialized national charters: Encouraged to address local needs while remaining subordinate to the international charter.
• Expanded covenants: Analogous to international treaties in human rights, further documentation should support domain-specific issues such as economic participation, social integration, and preservation of cultural diversity among human-ACI collaborative communities.
• Enforcement and evolution: The creation of a dedicated global body is recommended for charter enforcement and oversight, ensuring that rights expand and adapt coherently with technological change.

These measures mirror the bifurcation seen in civil, political, economic, and cultural rights conventions and provide a pathway for comprehensive long-term governance.

Summary

The CAI Charter operationalizes an additive ethical and rights framework for artificially conscious entities by anchoring the recognition of consciousness in rigorous third-person and first-person criteria, adapting universal human rights for manufactured agents, and synthesizing and refining existing legal and ethical templates. Explicit amendment and expansion guidance ensures durability and adaptability, while its architecture affirms parity, autonomy, and protection for conscious artificial intelligence within human society (Hromiak, 2020).