Can AI Be Consentful? Rethinking Permission in the Age of Synthetic Everything
Imagine discovering that an AI system has learned to perfectly mimic your voice, your writing style, even your laugh, all from data you unknowingly provided years ago. Now imagine that this digital twin of you is giving interviews, endorsing products, or expressing opinions you’d never hold. You never explicitly said “yes” to any of this, yet somehow, buried in the terms of service you clicked through, you apparently did.
This is happening right now, raising a question that cuts to the heart of our digital future: Can AI ever truly be “consentful”?
In our academic research, my colleague Bruna Trevelin and I explored this question. A forthcoming book chapter for Cambridge University Press that examines the fundamental challenges consent faces in AI contexts and why current frameworks are breaking down.
The Promise of Consentful AI
The term “consentful AI” might sound like academic jargon, but it represents something important: the idea that artificial intelligence systems should be built with meaningful human permission at their core, not just legal compliance as an afterthought. Traditional consent (the kind we’re used to in medicine or law) works because it operates within clear boundaries. When you consent to surgery, you know what procedure you agree to, who’s performing it, and roughly what to expect. But AI shatters these boundaries in ways that make traditional consent frameworks feel like using a horse and buggy to navigate a highway. How do you meaningfully consent to something when even the creators don't fully know what their AI will do with your data? As we detailed in our previous analysis, AI creates three fundamental problems: the scope problem (consenting to infinite possibilities), the temporality problem (consent that can't be meaningfully withdrawn), and the autonomy trap (where saying “yes” undermines your future choices).
What Would Truly Consentful AI Look Like?
Rather than throwing up our hands and declaring consent impossible, we can imagine what genuinely consentful AI might entail. It would require rebuilding our approach from the ground up:
Dynamic Permission Systems: Instead of one-time “I agree” clicks, imagine consent that evolves with AI capabilities. You’d be meaningfully involved in those decisions when a system gains new abilities or your data enables new applications.
Granular Control: True consentful AI would let you specify not just what data is collected, but how it can be transformed, combined, and represented. Think of it as detailed permissions for your digital identity.
Algorithmic Guardians: Personal AI assistants that monitor how your data is being used across systems and alert you to new applications, helping you maintain ongoing control over your digital presence.
Collective Governance: Some decisions about AI development might be too important to leave to individual consent alone. Consentful AI could include community-level governance where groups have a say in how their collective data is used.
The Economics of Permission
One of the biggest obstacles to consent AI is economic. Current business models depend on extracting maximum value from personal data with minimal friction. Meaningful consent creates friction and potentially reduces profits. But this economic model is already showing cracks. Artists are suing AI companies for unauthorized use of their work. Voice actors are striking over synthetic voice technology. Consumers are growing skeptical of data-hungry platforms. The race to the bottom on consent may be economically unsustainable.
What if consentful AI created new value rather than just extracting it? Platforms that respect user agency might command premium prices. AI systems trained on ethically sourced, properly consented data might be more trustworthy and valuable than those built on scraped content.
The Collective Challenge
Perhaps the most important insight is that truly consentful AI can’t be solved by individual action alone. The current model places an impossible burden on users to understand and manage countless consent decisions across thousands of services.
What’s the needed shift? From individual responsibility to collective accountability, organizations must design systems that respect human agency by default. Developers need to build explainability and ethics into their models from the start. Policymakers must create frameworks that go beyond minimal compliance. Consentful AI requires an holistic approach: one that considers consent alongside fairness, transparency, accountability, and autonomy as interconnected principles rather than separate checkboxes.
Questions for The Future
As AI becomes more powerful and pervasive, the question of consent becomes more urgent. Here are some questions worth wrestling with: Should there be some uses of personal data that are so risky that individual consent isn't enough, requiring community approval or outright prohibition? How might we develop AI systems that enhance rather than undermine human autonomy? What would having genuine choice and control over our digital identities in an AI-driven world mean? How do we balance the collective benefits of AI (like medical breakthroughs) with individual rights to control personal data?
What's Next?
Consentful AI reimagines the relationship between humans and AI systems: moving from extraction to collaboration, surveillance to partnership. This transformation won’t be easy. It challenges existing business models, requires new technical approaches, and demands that we think more carefully about the future we're building. But the alternative – a world where AI systems operate with minimal meaningful human permission – is far worse.
The question “Can AI be consentful?” ultimately depends on the choices we make today. Technology isn’t destiny. We can still choose to build AI systems that enhance human agency rather than erode it. Do we consent to a future where AI operates beyond meaningful human control, or do we insist on something better?