Report from The Verge
In Brief – Federal District Judge Anne Conway rejected the efforts of AI companion chatbot service Character AI and Google to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the mother of a teenage user of the service who committed suicide. Conway, who largely rejected the companies’ First Amendment-based arguments and waived away precedents related to videogames, social media, and other expressive mediums that granted their operators free speech rights, said in her order that she is “not prepared to hold that Character AI’s output is speech”. Although Google does not own Character AI, the judge ruled that the digital giant will remain a defendant in the case due to the many links to the companion chatbot company, including that company’s founders were former Google employees who were eventually rehired by Google, and that the chatbot’s service operates on Google’s cloud service. Other claims the judge is allowing to proceed include alleging deceptive trade practices for not being clear that the chatbot characters are not real people and that Character AI negligently violated a rule meant to prevent adults from communicating sexually with minors online.
Context – Alleged harm to young users from engaging with AI “companions” is an AI industry version of what many critics see as the worst of social media. Most objectionable content on the social media platforms is created by other users and therefore the companies are generally protected from liability by Sec. 230. Critics have therefore been resorting to legislation and lawsuits targeting so-called “addictive” social media features. State laws trying to ban or otherwise regulate those features are facing skeptical federal judges, but, like in this case, the liability lawsuits are having much better luck with judges. Furthermore, the application of Sec. 230 to AI services is a huge open question, with Justice Gorsuch openly skeptical back in 2023. However, a strong argument can be made that everything created by a generative AI chatbot is just an advanced algorithmic re-ordering of existing third-party content.