"The Uphill AI Contract Challenge The Intra-Active Task: Reimagining Contracts"

Sammanfattning: The traditional contract theories are insufficient to handle the challenges Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently causing and will continue to cause to contract law. These challenges involve problems concerning the subject/object divide, agency, the embedding of legal code into interactive programming code, and ethical aspects concerning the transfer of power away from lawyers. To contrast traditional contract theories, Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action, spacetimemattering, and ethico-onto-epistem-ology are used together with an antimethodological approach using narratological delimitations. These frameworks allow us to analyse analogue contracts and find that contracts are dynamic rather than linear phenomena. This challenges Cartesian-Newtonian paradigms and shows that contracts and their clauses display agency and shape contract interactions. It is emphasised throughout this thesis that lawyers must understand how AI technologies work to manage them effectively; a comprehensive description of AI technology is provided for this purpose. Incorporating AI into contract law strengthens many of the findings concerning analogue contracts, highlighting contract agency, an increased need to understand the materiality of the AI contract, and showing novel kinds of agency. However, the digital transformation of contracts also introduces new challenges; they are influenced by the biases of both developers and training data, posing risks to the stability of contract law and human existence. The accelerated development of AI and its biases, coupled with capitalist incentives, poses risks that may be underestimated through optimistic narratives. The thesis concludes that the Baradian concepts help examine AI and contracts as the impact of the material code is highlighted; it emphasises the need for technological knowhow among lawyers if they are to keep control over the law; it shows that ethics aspects need to be highlighted within the AI contract law as we advance. Furthermore, it argues for multiple ways to conduct AI contract research to understand the phenomena. This thesis emphasises the need to dissect AI technology so that lawyers can continue understanding and controlling law.