Clay Calvert
Role at the time: Nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor of law emeritus at the University of Florida, writing on AEI's blog
Response to this claim
The First Amendment bars Megan Garcia's claims against Character.AI because they would impose liability for expressive content that the platform's users have a right to receive.
“The fact that users’ inputs influence speech produced by chatbots doesn’t change the fact that chatbot output is speech. ... It would be a mistake for Conway to conclude that Garcia doesn’t involve speech.”
Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that chatbot output is speech under the Supreme Court's reasoning in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association and criticizes the court's reliance on Justice Barrett's concurrence in Moody v. NetChoice.
Why we used this label
The reference point is Character.AI's argument that the First Amendment bars tort claims seeking to hold it liable for its chatbots' output. Defended or excused: Calvert argues that the First Amendment applies to the chatbot output at issue and warns against a ruling that it is not speech. The closest competing label is Challenged characterization; it loses because he goes beyond disputing the court's description of the output and argues for the protection on which Character.AI's defense rests.