Socio-Technical Fiction and Legal Exegesis
Exploring the AI Act in the Near Future of Agentic AI
Mahan Mehrvarz (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
Marie Therese Sekwenz (TU Delft - Technology, Policy and Management)
Dave Murray-Rust (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
Ben Wagner (University Austria, TU Delft - Technology, Policy and Management)
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Abstract
AI systems are increasingly embedded in workplace platforms, where they infer performance, attention, and affect from everyday traces. The EU AI Act regulates such systems through risk categories and governance concepts, yet it remains unclear how these concepts operationalize when AI becomes an agentic infrastructure. We present a near-future performance review fiction accompanied by short legal annotations. Rather than assessing compliance, the annotations function as legal exegesis: They mark where oversight, contestability, and sensitive inference shift meaning when enacted through interfaces, procedures, and cross-referencing agents. The provocation foregrounds three dynamics: The chameleonic aspects of risk categories, oversight collapsing into recursive system input, and sensitive domains becoming inferable through proxy data traces. We argue that "fiction and exegesis"offers a situated method for interrogating legal governance before such systems stabilize in practice.
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