ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that at least in relation to the substantive law of core criminal offences – the kind that form the foundations of substantive criminal law teaching at universities – these challenges are sometimes overstated. It aims to consider whether the criminal law has the resources to help us identify cases in which the artificial intelligence technology (AIT) seemingly criminal activity should be attributed to a human defendant. The chapter addresses offences with three different types of actus reus stipulations separately, since they raise different issues in the attribution analysis. These are: specific conduct offences, specific consequence offences and state of affairs offences. The set of concerns most frequently voiced are to do with instances in which the AIT is faced with a difficult choice about which criminalised outcome to bring about. There are several different inchoate offences, but once again, they are all composed of actus reus and mens rea elements that have previously been analysed.
