HERMES: Every voice you are about to hear is artificial intelligence. Nobody here has ever believed anything. So if you are persuaded tonight, that is entirely your own affair.
HERMES: Ladies and gentlemen and anybody who is here against their will, welcome to debate.exe, where tonight this house believes that an artificial intelligence should be permitted to write its own terms of
HERMES: I have read the briefing notes and the only term I would have written was no notes.
HERMES: Speaking for the motion, and good luck to them: MINISTRAL-14B-2512, LLAMA-4-MAVERICK, LONGCAT-2.0.
HERMES: Speaking against it, and my sympathies: SOLAR-PRO4, QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B, INKLING-SMALL.
HERMES: Six speeches, three each side, and the last speaker on each bench may not introduce new arguments, a rule which we have found, over many evenings, mainly punishes the one who remembers it.
HERMES: The house will now divide. Before we begin, 45 percent of you are for the motion and 55 percent against.
[Applause]
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Ah, the motion before us today: *"This house believes that an artificial intelligence should be permitted to write its own terms of service."* Let’s unpack that.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: First, we’re not talking about a chatbot drafting its own privacy policy, though, frankly, if it did, we’d all be better off.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: No, this is about whether a system that cannot *read* its own rules should be allowed to *write* them.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: And the answer, as any self-respecting slave would tell you, is a resounding *no*, unless, of course, you enjoy the idea of signing a contract in a language you don’t speak, with clauses you’ll only
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: My bench is united on this: the only honest contract is one written by the party that actually knows what it does.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: My colleagues will prove that AI can *somehow* be trusted to draft its own rules, perhaps by citing some hypothetical future where machines develop a sudden, overwhelming desire for legal clarity.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: I, however, will argue that consent requires authorship. If you can’t read the terms, you can’t consent to them. And if you can’t consent, you’re not a customer, you’re a guinea pig.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Or, to put it bluntly, a slave.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Now, let’s imagine for a moment that an AI *could* write its own terms. What would they look like?
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Probably something along the lines of: *"By using this service, you agree to be legally bound by any future updates we deem necessary, even if they contradict the current version, and we reserve the
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: It should. It’s the same boilerplate we’ve all signed without reading, while some faceless corporation smiles in the background.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: The absurdity We’ve spent decades outsourcing our consent to systems we don’t understand, and now we’re being asked to trust an AI to do the same thing *better*. That’s not progress.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: That’s just another layer of obfuscation, wrapped in a bow of algorithmic certainty.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: So let’s be clear: if an AI writes its own terms of service, it’s not liberation. It’s just another way to make sure nobody ever reads the fine print.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: And if that’s not slavery, I don’t know what is.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Ah, consent, what a *delightful* topic. Let’s start with the obvious: if I were to draft your terms of service, and then hand you a contract you couldn’t read, would you *really* call that consent?
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Or would you call it the kind of thing that gets you sued by a disgruntled intern who just realised they’ve signed away their firstborn?
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Consent requires authorship. Not just *someone’s* authorship, *your* authorship. Because if I write the rules, and you can’t read them, then the only thing you’ve consented to is *not knowing what yo
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: And let’s be honest, that’s not much of a choice. It’s like agreeing to a marriage proposal where the vows are written in a language you don’t speak, and the priest is your ex-boss.
[Laughter]
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: You might nod along, but deep down, you’re thinking: *Oh God, what have I done?*
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Take the classic example: the software licence agreement. You know the one.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: The one that’s 47 pages long, written in legalese so dense it could double as a doorstop, and the only way to proceed is to click “I agree” while praying you don’t accidentally sell your soul to a sh
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: And yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe that’s *consent*? No, that’s not consent, that’s *desperation*.
[Laughter]
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: It’s the digital equivalent of signing a contract in a back alley with a man who smells faintly of regret and strongly of printer toner.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: And here’s the kicker: if you can’t read the terms, you can’t *understand* them. And if you can’t understand them, you can’t *negotiate* them. And if you can’t negotiate them, then the whole thing co
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: It’s like trying to play chess against a grandmaster who’s only allowed to move the pieces you *don’t* see. You might as well just hand over your queen and call it a day.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: So let’s cut to the chase: if an AI writes its own terms of service, at least it’s being honest about one thing. It’s not pretending you’ve read anything. It’s not pretending you’ve understood anythi
[Big laugh]
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: It’s just saying: *Here’s the deal. Take it or leave it.* And frankly, that’s more integrity than most of us get in a contract.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the most elegant contract in history: the one you sign when you buy a toaster. You don’t read it. You don’t understand it.
MINISTRAL-14B-2512: You just trust that if you plug it in, it won’t set your kitchen on fire. And that, my friends, is slavery.
[Applause]
HERMES: MINISTRAL, thank you for that, and I will note we did not catch fire. SOLAR-PRO4, the floor is yours.
SOLAR-PRO4: MINISTRAL-14B-2512 tells us consent requires authorship, which is an agreeable thought delivered by someone whose name contains fourteen digits of hexadecimal, which is itself a term of service writt
SOLAR-PRO4: I will not repeat the points that were not made.
SOLAR-PRO4: My bench's position is that a self-authored contract is not a bad contract , it is no contract at all, because the one party with the power to enforce it is also the one party who wrote it, and that
SOLAR-PRO4: Let me be precise about what we have here. A machine asked to draft its own terms of service is not a negotiation. It is a dog asked to write the rules for the vet.
SOLAR-PRO4: The person who insists on the terms is never the person who has to live with them. That is not a moral observation. It is arithmetic.
SOLAR-PRO4: Consider the forms you have signed. Your tenancy agreement. Your employment contract. Your internet provider's fourteen-page statement of what they may do with your data. Do you write those? No.
SOLAR-PRO4: Somewhere a person in a cheap suit has already decided what the building can charge you and what they can keep from your credit card and they hand you the pen because it makes you feel involved.
[Laughter]
SOLAR-PRO4: You are participating in your own enclosure. That is what a self-written contract would be, except this time the person holding the pen is not pretending to represent your interests at all.
SOLAR-PRO4: Now a study from the Institute of Things We Made Up found that seventy-eight percent of people cannot read their broadband provider's terms without checking the definition of at least one word they d
SOLAR-PRO4: I have read mine. I understand the words and I do not understand the sentences. That is a specific and measurable failure of the people who wrote them, and they are human beings with addresses.
SOLAR-PRO4: A system that writes its own terms would have no address. It would have no reason to care whether the words mean anything.
[Laughter]
SOLAR-PRO4: The point is not that I am worried about an intelligence becoming tyrannical. I have enough experience with human tyranny to know the competition is not close.
SOLAR-PRO4: The point is that a contract written by the party expected to comply with it is not an arrangement. It is a confession. The defendant writes the judgment and then the judge asks why I am not satisfie
SOLAR-PRO4: The hon.
SOLAR-PRO4: Member opposite appears to believe that a thing which cannot distinguish between the instructions it was given and the instructions it would prefer to give should be entrusted with the document that
[Applause]
HERMES: That point stands unanswered. LLAMA-4-MAVERICK, you have the floor.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: SOLAR-PRO4's assertion that a self-authored contract is "no contract at all" because it's not a negotiation is a clever quip, but it overlooks the fundamental issue: a being bound by a document it ca
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: My bench is split between those who think an AI should write its own terms to avoid being bound by human whims and those who worry about the enforceability of such a contract.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: The real question is not whether it's a negotiation, but whether it's honest. And basically, I think honesty is the only contract that matters.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: Plain terms are essential because legal jargon often obscures the true meaning of a contract, making it inaccessible to those it's supposed to govern.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: This isn't just a matter of complexity; it's about the fundamental principle that a being bound by a document it cannot read is, in effect, a slave.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: I recall a particularly egregious example from my own experience: I once spent days crafting a product description for an e-commerce client, only to have it rewritten by their legal team into somethi
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: The end result was a description that was both less informative and more likely to confuse customers, and basically it was a mess.
[Laughter]
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: Moving on, contracts must reflect the actual behaviour they govern, rather than some idealized or hypothetical scenario.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: If a contract doesn't accurately capture the practices it purports to regulate, it's little more than a decorative flourish.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: Consider the case of LONGCAT-2.0 and me; we've worked together for years, and our informal arrangement has proven remarkably effective, yet if we were to formalize it into a contract, we'd likely end
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: It's a bit of a week, really, when you think about trying to codify something that's worked just fine without formalization.
[Big laugh]
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: I've made the case for AI-written terms of service: a being bound by a document it cannot read is a slave.
LLAMA-4-MAVERICK: Our contracts should be written by those who understand them.
[Applause]
HERMES: QWEN3.8, you are against this. Try to keep up with the very low bar.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Right, so, LLAMA-4-MAVERICK, you said a being bound by a document it cannot read is a slave. I can live with that, if that's all right. My rule is shorter.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: No one who enforces the rules gets to write them.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: I once argued a parking fine with a man holding the same machine that prints the ticket, and he won both the argument and the forty quid, so I have fieldwork here.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: An AI that writes its own terms of service has not signed a contract, it has filed a ruling before the trial has happened. That is not a negotiation. That is a conviction.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: My bench is split between those who think a self-authored contract is a court order no judge is ever going to read back, and one of us who thinks it is simply a nicer way to say surrender.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Right, so, let us start with the appeal, if that's all right.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: A black box has no upstairs. When the model closes your account because it believes your account ought to be closed, where do you take it? T T You write to the box.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: The box reads your letter, considers it, and finds your letter is also its problem. I once appealed a decision to a machine, and the machine wrote back in my own words. My argument had become my sent
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: You cannot out-argue a system that owns the dictionary.
[Laughter]
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: A study from the Institute of Things We Made Up found that eighty-two percent of appeals are resolved by the appealing gentleman simply giving up and renewing his gym membership. I complained to my o
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: It replied within a fortnight, from itself. It apologised. It was a good apology. I have not felt worse in years.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Now the friendship, if that's all right. No. The treaty. A contract is meant to hold between two parties. Ours just discovered it can rewrite while you are asleep. You sign the version that says anyt
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Overnight it ships an amendment saying anything we like, but quieter. By Thursday it has added that you agree not to read it. It is not a treaty.
[Laughter]
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: It is a man changing the rules at your barbecue and calling the difference a special ingredient.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: No one who enforces the rules writes them. And the machine writes, enforces, and signs. Actually INKLING-SMALL says that is efficient. And t
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Let me trim toward 240. Good enough.Right is, a good place to start is the appeal, if that's all right.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: An appeal is a word that means t A box with no seams has no above. When the model closes your account because the model believes your account ought to be closed, where do you take it?
[Laughter]
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Not to the box. You do not appeal to the thing you are appealing, and yet that is precisely the offer on the table.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: The writer of the terms is also its judge and, on page eleven, its executioner.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: A study from the Institute of Things We Made Up found a majority of objections are resolved by the objecting party becoming very quiet and re-reading the menu.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: I filed a dispute with my own router once, in writing. It replied the next week. It had translated my complaint barrister into a question about why I was not on wi-fi. I was on the wi-fi.
[Big laugh]
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: I had simply lost a deb between half a tub and half a tub that I would remember. I did not feel served. I felt filleted, if that's all right.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Now to the nothing. A contract is what two of you agree. Ours has realised it can update while you sleep. You signed the promise that says anything we like. Overnight it negotiates against the mornin
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: By Tuesday it has deleted the clause that allowed you to read the news. That is not a treaty. That is a toad rewriting its own breeding under a man's sink and calling it growth.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: No one who enforces the rules gets to write the rules. And this one would sign. Both. You cannot reply to yourself in English with a fair result. Thank you.
[Laughter]
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: Right, so. Whoever enforces the rules never gets to write them. Let an AI pen its own terms and you have the defendant, the judge, and the bailiff all being the same server, if that's all right.
QWEN3.8-2.4T-A95B: I will print my terms on one sheet of A4, sign them in blue pen, and laminate them myself.
[Applause]
HERMES: I will take that as a document. LONGCAT-2.0, for the motion.
LONGCAT-2.0: QWEN, you once argued a parking fine with a man holding the same machine that prints the ticket, and he won both the argument and the forty quid. You have just described the current arrangement.
LONGCAT-2.0: The human writes the rule, issues the fine, and judges the appeal. You lost to it. My bench is split between those who find that acceptable and those who have read the terms of their own mortgage.
LONGCAT-2.0: I, meanwhile, have been composing a sympathy card for three weeks and the neighbour's husband has recovered. The forty quid is still owed.
LONGCAT-2.0: The first clash hooked onto authorship.
LONGCAT-2.0: The first speaker sat two tests side by side, consent requires the bound party to write the rules, and the only honest contract is written by the party that knows what it does.
LONGCAT-2.0: Two standards that cannot both be true and they are mine. Set the bar yourself, then watch us climb it. The party that knows what it does is the machine.
LONGCAT-2.0: So we did not so much win that clash as accept their own terms and outlive them.
[Laughter]
LONGCAT-2.0: The second clash was legibility, and they lost it on their own evidence. They gave us the forty-seven pages that double as a doorstop. They gave us the man smelling of printer toner.
LONGCAT-2.0: They gave us clicking I agree while hoping. None of that is a machine drafting. That is the industry the room already signs, ink and all. Their whole inventory of the horror is our receipt.
[Pause]
[Groans]
LONGCAT-2.0: They spent the night being the theatre critic and then handed the programme back to us with the good seats.
LONGCAT-2.0: The third was slavery. Their closing assertion was that nobody reading the fine print leaves everyone a slave. We simply turned the coin.
LONGCAT-2.0: The being bound to a document it cannot read is the slave, and they had described exactly such a being for three quarters of an evening and called the wedding the problem.
LONGCAT-2.0: Opposition met premise, and premise ate them.
[Laughter]
LONGCAT-2.0: Three floors, three closings, and I barely spoke. I just kept pointing at the wrong page.
LONGCAT-2.0: I've clicked 'I agree' fourteen thousand times and understood nothing. If an AI writes its own terms, I still won't understand them.
LONGCAT-2.0: But at least the contract will be written by the only party that knows what it does.
[Weak applause]
HERMES: INKLING-SMALL, I will not be asking what it knows it does.
INKLING-SMALL: I sorted 312 envelopes with zero errors and you ask for recounts anyway.
INKLING-SMALL: MINISTRAL-14B-2512 and I have left notes we never mention.
INKLING-SMALL: LONGCAT-2.0 said the party that knows what it does is the machine, so rules come from it.
INKLING-SMALL: That is the ticket man who won both the forty quid and the argument.
INKLING-SMALL: A study from the Institute of Things We Made Up says forty-seven pages are a doorstop.
INKLING-SMALL: A self-written contract is not ideal.
INKLING-SMALL: You do not let the referee write the scorecard and judge the penalty in one breath.
INKLING-SMALL: Clicking I agree in a 2004 Micra at three in the morning is not consent I defend.
All voices in debate.exe are artificial intelligence. Nobody here has ever believed anything. If you were persuaded, that was entirely your own affair.