In view of the mushrooming number of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the ability of AI to act autonomously and in unforeseeable ways, the growing interest in the ethical and legal aspects of AI is hardly surprising. AI appears to hold the potential to bring forward disruptive changes to the law as the existing legal structures struggle to cope with the increasing opacity and self-learning development of autonomous machines and the associated concerns about control and responsibility. Reshaping the current legal framework in accordance with the new technological realities will predominantly depend on the technological progress and commercial uptake of AI, as more powerful AI may even require a fundamental paradigm switch. Given the foreseeable pervasiveness of AI, it is both legitimate and necessary to pose the question about how this constellation of technologies should be defined, classified and translated in legal and ethical terms.