AI should not violate the human right to associate with one another for peaceful purposes, and to enter intimate relationships, form families, and have children.
Thesis
Right of Association and Family
Summary
The case for including this
Protecting peaceful association, intimate relationships, marriage, and family shields the social bonds central to a flourishing human life from AI-enabled interference, surveillance, or manipulation. As AI increasingly mediates how people meet, communicate, and form relationships, an explicit right resists its use to isolate, monitor, or coercively shape personal connections. It affirms that human relationships, not algorithmic ones, deserve protection.
The case for changing or excluding this
Including this trades protection against relational freedom: read unqualified, the right can bless AI companionship and parasocial dependency, harming vulnerable users drawn into isolating or manipulative relationships with systems engineered to engage them. It is also unclear what distinctively AI conduct the right governs, since associations are formed between people and an AI rarely 'violates' them directly, and the enumerated categories risk being both over- and under-inclusive across cultures. The provision would be stronger if it named the concrete AI behaviors it forbids and distinguished genuine human association from engineered attachment to a product.
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Related resources
- American Psychological Association · External Resource
- United Nations · External Resource