By Tuesday’s end, it appeared as though the Supreme Court is preparing to leave intact Section 230, the federal law that provides a liability shield for social media platforms and search engines.
One of the most resonant lines to emerge from Tuesday’s hearing in the Gonzales v. Google case came from Justice Elena Kagan, who noted many of the Supreme Court justices are out of their depth when it comes to tech talk.
“We’re a court; we really don’t know about these things,” Kagan said. “These are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet.”
Point taken, Justice Kagan: These aren’t tech geniuses we’re dealing with in the court’s nine justices. But that doesn’t mean their queries were useless. (My MSNBC colleague Jessica Levinson published some great insight on this case that’s definitely worth your time.)
Point taken, Justice Kagan: These aren’t tech geniuses we’re dealing with in the court’s nine justices.
One line that’s been getting some pickup has piqued my interest. It came from conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch and concerned whether artificial intelligence chatbots — like the ones you see “writing” legislation and term papers — would be covered by free speech protections if they’re deployed by search engines.
It’s not a hypothetical scenario. Google’s parent company — that is, the same company being sued in the Section 230 case — has invested heavily in developing generative AI tools that will allow its search engine to provide users with conversational responses, rather than just links.
But according to Gorsuch, chatbot-generated search results won’t be protected in the same way as results generated by traditional AI algorithms.
“Artificial intelligence generates poetry,” Gorsuch said during the hearing. “It generates polemics today that would be content that goes beyond picking, choosing, analyzing or digesting content. And that is not protected. Let’s assume that’s right. Then the…
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