A journalist considering using AI to draft a story asked whether AI output could be protected under the First Amendment. Lawyers for tech companies are arguing that words from generative AI should be protected, citing defenses in cases where a Character.AI chatbot seemingly encouraged a teenager to commit suicide and OpenAI’s ChatGPT allegedly aided a university mass shooting, claiming speech rights for a “nonhuman speaker.” Courts have not given definitive guidance; the Character.AI suit was settled out of court, and the OpenAI case is still in early stages. A 2021 article from AI researchers described an LLM as a “system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms” without “any reference to meaning,” arguing LLM output “is not grounded in communicative intent” and therefore not speech. Meetali Jain, founder of the Tech Justice Law Project, argues “there is a distinction to make between words and speech,” with only the latter deserving First Amendment protection. Stanford Law grads proposed “speech certainty,” the idea that “speech is only speech if the speaker knows what he said when he said it,” arguing all outputs of machine-learned systems lack this.