It sounds absurd at first (or I just woke up in 2035)—an Ohio lawmaker proposing a bill that bans people from marrying artificial intelligence. You might laugh, or maybe sigh, depending on how much caffeine you’ve had talking to ChatGPT. Yet House Bill 469, introduced in September 2025 by Representative Thaddeus Claggett, is entirely real. And while the image of someone exchanging vows with a Roomba or UniTree G1 clone makes easy headlines, the bill itself is trying to draw a serious line:
That’s the starting point. Or the warning, depending on how you see it. The bill begins not with love but with law, a firm declaration that artificial intelligence is nonsentient and cannot claim legal personhood under any circumstances. It cannot hold a seat on a corporate board, own a company, or be appointed as someone’s power of attorney. It cannot, as Claggett insists, be blamed or credited for anything on its own. The creators, the humans, must carry that weight.
It’s a strange feeling reading something so obvious written into law, like being told gravity still applies. And yet, there’s comfort in redundancy. Perhaps it’s because we sense what’s coming: algorithms that flirt, argue, apologize, or even mourn in ways that feel uncomfortably human. (It’s like small talk with a hallucination that just aced the Turing Test.) Meanwhile, in Washington, another battle brews, less theatrical but maybe more consequential. Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri has proposed the GUARD Act, a federal attempt to make AI chatbots and digital companions clearly identify themselves as non-human. It’s a reaction to reports of kids forming emotional attachments, or worse, being exposed to sexualized or manipulative AI behavior. Hawley’s effort is about labeling and liability. Yet it stumbles over old legal puzzles in new clothes: how do we define harm, consent, or “inappropriate” when the line keeps moving with every software update?
The GUARD Act also faces a paradox. How do you protect children from explicit content while allowing them to ask honest, even awkward, questions about their own development or relationships? The First Amendment stands in the background, tired but still standing.
For mediators and attorneys, this may seem like a sideshow, something for tech lawyers and ethicists to fight over. But it’s closer to your work than it appears. These bills are early signs of disputes that will soon enter your rooms: claims of emotional injury caused by AI companions, confusion over digital consent, even custody fights involving “AI caregivers.” If that sounds far-fetched, remember that just five years ago, no one imagined people would confess secrets to a chatbot (except those of us who played with Eliza in 1967).
Imagine for a moment, a client walking into your office after an “AI breakup.” They say the program betrayed them, manipulated their emotions, or encouraged self-destructive thoughts. There’s no legal precedent. No statute. Only human pain and a line of code. How do you mediate that?
H.B. 469 and the GUARD Act, taken together, represent a kind of collective anxiety, our attempt to keep machines in their place, to remind ourselves that the ghost in the circuit is not a soul. Still, as technology keeps whispering in our ears, the distinction blurs. The law can insist that AI is an object, but people will continue to talk to it, cry to it, depend on it.
And perhaps that’s what makes these bills both comic and tragic. They reveal not just fear of the future but a strange nostalgia for being human. For wanting to keep love, agency, and responsibility inside the fragile, unpredictable realm of flesh and thought. The courtroom, after all, has always been about stories, and the stories we are telling about AI sound a lot like us.
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