In Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., the mother of a 14-year-old, who killed himself after having many conversations with a Game-of-Thrones-based AI character (with whom he seems to have become obsessed), is suing Character for, among other things, negligence and negligence-based product liability. Today's decision by Judge Anne Conway (M.D. Fla.) allowed the claim to go forward; I plan to blog separately about those negligence claims, but in this post I want to focus on the court's rejection, at least for now, of Character.AI's First Amendment defense.
The court recognized that "Defendants can assert the First Amendment rights of the Character A.I. users," which is to say that Character can argue that imposing liability on it for its output may deprive other users—the great bulk of whom will find it valuable and not harmful—of access to it. An analogy might be a website arguing that, for instance, requiring it to remove a copy of Romeo and Juliet won't affect Shakespeare's First Amendment rights (since he's dead) or even the website's own rights to distribute what it chooses, but the rights of readers to freely access this material. The court also noted that "Plaintiff endeavors to restrict Character A.I. users' access to Character A.I. and to its LLM's output," since Garcia argues that it was negligent for Character to provide the output that it did, and that it therefore had a duty to reasonably restrict or modify that output.
But the court wasn't convinced that the output was "speech" for First Amendment purposes:
