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PART X — Law, Governance, and Rights

Part X examines the emerging legal and regulatory architecture surrounding digital humans, tracing how existing law strains to accommodate beings that look and act human but aren't. Chapter 45 surveys the current legal landscape and the core tension running through the whole section: how to regulate virtual beings and AI-generated identities without stifling innovation, while balancing ethics and the need for coordinated global governance. Chapter 46 dives into the hardest conceptual questions of personhood and accountability — whether digital humans can bear criminal culpability, whether the firms that build "fake humans" should face liability (even imprisonment), how to manage the risks of AI twins and synthetic likenesses, when harm inflicted in virtual spaces should count as real, the problem of models trained on dubious or unconsented data, and the provocative analogy of governing digital humans the way we govern pets. Chapter 47 turns from theory to concrete policy, showing how real-world regimes already touch this space: the EU AI Act's compliance demands on digital teachers, Australia's voluntary safety standard, U.S. executive action and foreign policy, platform-level rules from YouTube and Meta's inauthentic-behavior enforcement, and the data-privacy challenges raised by shadow profiles and digital twins. Taken together, the section argues that digital humans expose deep gaps in frameworks built for natural persons, and that workable governance will require blending legal personhood theory, liability rules, privacy protection, and both governmental and platform regulation across jurisdictions.

Chapter 45. Legal Frameworks for Digital Humans

Chapter 46. Personhood, Liability, and Likeness

Chapter 47. Standards, Policy, and Regulation

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