Paper Offers a Five-Principle Policy and Design Framework Defining Human Functions That Cannot Be Delegated to Machines

FOR RELEASE: October 26, 2026

Contact: Richard T. Kaplar
The Media Institute
571-244-0815

McLean, Va., Oct. 26, 2026 – A new white paper released today by The Media Institute examines the rapid rise of three kinds of digital stand-ins – avatars, recommendation engines, and artificial companions – and their escalating consequences for individual agency, democratic discourse, and free expression culture.

Titled “The Optional Self: Digital Proxies and the Future of a Free Expression Culture,” the paper by Stuart N. Brotman warns that while these technologies are often marketed as separate conveniences, they converge into a singular, transformative arrangement: one where individuals routinely outsource their presence, judgment, and emotional vulnerability to frictionless automated surrogates.

Brotman notes that existing regulatory initiatives – such as European Union disclosure mandates and a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into companion bots – focus primarily on labeling and transparency. However, they stop short of confronting the foundational question: Which acts must a free society refuse to delegate to machines at all?

To address this challenge, Brotman proposes five foundational principles for platform designers, institutional leaders, and policymakers:

  • Preserve a doctrine of non-delegable acts by keeping consequential functions, such as legal assent, sworn testimony, votes, binding representations, and certain forms of public speech, anchored exclusively to accountable human principals.
  • Make attribution honest, not merely disclosed, distinguishing between basic transcription tools and generative AI intermediaries composing in a person’s name.
  • Locate responsibility before harm occurs by adapting agency, apparent authority, and product-liability doctrines to settle accountability in advance.
  • Protect the conditions of self-formation, recognizing that free expression depends on individuals continuing to practice speaking, judging, and relating as themselves.
  • Keep proxy substitution optional and not mandatory, ensuring that embodied human participation is never treated as a competitive disadvantage or noncompliance.

“The point is not purity; it is boundary. A nation that believes in self-government cannot be indifferent to whether its citizens still practice being selves in the demanding, old-fashioned sense,” writes Brotman. “If we let the self become optional everywhere, we may wake up to find that liberty has become oddly impersonal: as broad as ever on paper, but detached from the kind of people it was written to protect.”

Brotman is Digital Media Laureate and Distinguished Senior Fellow at The Media Institute. He served as President and CEO of The Museum of Television & Radio (now The Paley Center for Media) and as the inaugural Visiting Professor of Entertainment and Media Law at Harvard Law School. He was a member of the founding team of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and has advised four presidential administrations on a bipartisan basis. A member of The Media Institute’s First Amendment Advisory Council, he oversees the Institute’s Digital Media Center and contributes to The Madison Project: Free Speech and Press in American Democracy.

“The Optional Self” is published jointly by the Digital Media Center and The Madison Project. The full paper can be read HERE.

The Media Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation specializing in communications policy and the First Amendment. For more information, visit mediainstitute.org.

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