Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter adopts a socio-legal approach to digital constitutionalism as a lens to analyse the impact on the constitutional ecosystem of AI-populated metaverses. Metaverses represent disruptive technologies characterised by a global nature, where individuals from different jurisdictions interact, thus generating constitutional collisions. AI technologies employed in the metaverse offer a fully immersive and tangible user experience, blurring the distinction between physical and virtual worlds even more and amplifying the potential to violate individual privacy, process sensitive data for other purposes, compress freedom of expression or the right to property. Metaverses are not determining a new wave of constitutional innovation nor targeted constitutional responses. They are rather offering the possibility to test and consolidate AI-related rights and principles that have emerged over the past few decades, before the current AI hype. The legal-ethical-philosophical question related to the personality of AI avatars and their consequent potential to enjoy fundamental rights does not necessarily imply the emergence of new constitutional principles. We argue that the issue revolves around the need to preserve human dignity and to prevent that, through the compression of the rights of characters with human appearance, there might be a violation perpetrated on the general concept of human beings.
Source: Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7161848866