Free Speech Unmuted: Can AI Companies Be Sued For What AI Says?

A mother sues Character.AI, claiming that a conversation between her teenage son and a Character.AI chatbot led him to commit suicide. A conservative activist sues Meta, claiming that its AI generated false accusations about him. Jane and I analyze these cases, and more broadly, discuss lawsuits against AI companies, and possible First Amendment defenses to those lawsuits.

See also our past episodes:

• Free Speech Unmuted: Harvard vs. Trump: Free Speech and Government Grants
• Free Speech Unmuted: Trump's War on Big Law
• Can Non-Citizens Be Deported For Their Speech?
• Freedom of the Press, with Floyd Abrams
• Free Speech, Private Power, and Private Employees
• Court Upholds TikTok Divestiture Law
• Free Speech in European (and Other) Democracies, with Prof. Jacob Mchangama
• Protests, Public Pressure Campaigns, Tort Law, and the First Amendment
• Misinformation: Past, Present, and Future
• I Know It When I See It: Free Speech and Obscenity Laws
• Speech and Violence
• Emergency Podcast: The Supreme Court's Social Media Cases
• Internet Policy and Free Speech: A Conversation with Rep. Ro Khanna
• Free Speech, TikTok (and Bills of Attainder!), with Prof. Alan Rozenshtein
• The 1st Amendment on Campus with Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky
• Free Speech On Campus
• AI and Free Speech
• Free Speech, Government Persuasion, and Government Coercion
• Deplatformed: The Supreme Court Hears Social Media Oral Arguments
• Book Bans – or Are They?

Comments

[Don Nico]

It is endemic in a litigious society always to look for someone else to blame, especially if the someone else has deep pockets.

[ReaderY]

I testfire my rockets by firing at them your house and destroy it. But no problem, right? You’re not one of those durned litigious people looking for someone else to blame. You have only yourself to blame for buying a house in my path. So it’s all good, right?

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Throw in loser pays and it's a deal. And not just attorney's fees, but every cost associated with fighting your shoddy case -- time off work, travel, research, everything.

ETA it's funny how you can't distinguish from someone voluntarily using a product and you coming along afterwards to destroy a house.

[ReaderY]

Sure, I’m not litigious, I wouldn’t sue you over it. But since you’re not litigious, you wouldn’t sue me. After all, you voluntarily bought a house next to a rocket factory. I mean, what were you expecting? We’re only rocket scientists over here. It’s not like we rocket scientists have any reputation for common sense or street smarts or anything like that.

After all, you’ve been warned about people like us since at least Tom Lehrer the in the 1950s - “When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department...”

[Don Nico]

I did not say all litigation is stupid. You know better than that.
But do you deny that American society is more litigious than most.

[шинка]

Try living in New Jersey. Those of us cursed to live here refer to it as Sue Jersey...because...

[ReaderY]

Why in the world should technology companies be exempt from the liability the manufacturers of all other kinds of products are subject to?

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Yes, why should anyone be exempt from the wrath of lawyers with too few billable hours?

[Gunstar1]

Why shouldn't AI be able to do things that a human would be liable for? Oh that's right, it's the lawyers fault.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Lawyers write the laws, interpret the laws, enforce the laws, challenge the laws, and defend the laws.

Yes, it is the lawyers' fault.

[ReaderY]

I’m sorry, but destroying a person’s business or career by destroying their reputation is a real and very serious injury, not in any way something lawyers make up. It really happens. Things made up by AI get published, people take them as true and republish them, people act on them, people’s reputations and livelihoods get destroyed.

[Don Nico]

RY.
Nice evasion by using the passive voice.
Things don't get published. Persons publish things. Sue the person who puts the shit on the internet.
It is common knowledge that LLMs hallucinate. They even lie.

Damn, you can even kill yourself by drinking too much clean water. So sue Poland Springs? Stop being silly

[Don Nico]

"not in any way something lawyers make up. It really happens."
No one said the contrary. You are pointing your cannon in the wrong direction BECAUSE Sam Altman (etc) has deeper pockets.

[шинка]

AI just needs a disclaimer: "This is a shit product that will most likely offend you and hallucinate copiously. It also may be addictive and bad for your health."

There. Done.

[Stephen Lathrop]

шинка — You don't get it. The person damaged is not a person who will see that warning. The damage is done by publication, world-wide, of false and defamatory information about an innocent 3rd party who is not in on what is going on until after the damage is done. And no warning will be proof against others doing republications, if they leave the warning off.

[шинка]

You're essentially saying that you can sue someone for a bad algorithm.

Is it truly speech if a random number backed algorithm gets its word arrangement wrong?

If I roll a bunch of dice with words on them and string it into a false statement, can I be sued?

If I hand someone a cigarette and they get hooked and die from lung cancer, can I be sued for wrongful death because they didn't get to read the side of the pack from the start?

I do get it, maybe more so than I lead on.

[Don Nico]

Stephen, You of all people, who prize good and precise writing, let a sophistic use of the passive voice trick you into false outrage.

You sue the person who published the material, not the maker of the pen, or typewriter or computer, of Microsoft. or ChatGPT because the PERSON use that to write the defamatory material.

You of all people know who should be sued, and it is not Sam Altman.