Do Robots Have First Amendment Rights?

‘H ey Grok, why do I sweat so much at night?”

“Hey Grok, why am I still getting zits in middle age?”

“Hey Grok, will Diet Coke give me cancer?”

Undoubtedly, many of us have asked AI similar questions. In fact, the doctor we consult most may be a chatbot. They are cheap and accessible. When I recently asked Grok about how often it offers medical advice, it says it gets a “meaningful and consistent stream” of medical questions, and it preened that “users on X regularly praise my” health advice.

But New York legislators may soon pull the plug on Doc Grok. If they do, a rarely invoked First Amendment right might be in the spotlight: the right to listen.

A New York bill under consideration would ban AI chatbots from giving legal or medical advice. The basic idea is that because non-licensed humans can’t give medical or legal advice, chatbots shouldn’t be able to either. Of course, humans have a First Amendment right to speak, which may place some limits on how much speech a medical licensing board or bar association can rope off.

Whether a company running a chatbot has a free-speech claim regarding the bot’s responses to users is a difficult question. But it may also be the wrong question. Perhaps the better one is this: Do users have a right to receive the chatbot’s response? The answer is yes.

The right to receive information is the other side of the First Amendment coin. For decades, the Supreme Court has recognized that First Amendment protection for speech extends to “its source and to its recipients both.” In fact, a listener has a right to receive information even when the speaker has no right to speak it.

Take the 1965 case of Lamont v. Postmaster General, in which a Cold-War-era law required the post office to hold foreign mail deemed communist propaganda. A post office had confiscated a pamphlet called the “Peking Review #12,” addressed to Mr. Lamont. Lamont challenged the law as a violation of his First Amendment rights. The twist to the case was that the speaker, a non-citizen foreign correspondent, had no First Amendment right to speak. Nonetheless, the court held that Lamont had a right to receive the pamphlet, despite its allegedly subversive content.

This right to receive information has not often surfaced, yet it has clear salience for New York’s Doc Grok bill. Even if an AI company has no First Amendment right to whatever its chatbot pumps out in response to a question, the user still has a right to receive it, just as Lamont had a right to his Peking Review, even though the non-citizen mailing it from abroad had no constitutional right to send it.

The question then becomes whether the New York legislature has a compelling reason for overriding that right. The rationale behind the bill is the same that prohibits your unlicensed neighbor from insisting that you will score big in a lawsuit against your landlord for that icy sidewalk you slipped on: The government thinks you aren’t smart enough to recognize bad advice when you see it. Perhaps the legislature imagines New Yorkers falling for a red-eyed metal skeleton advising them to take anti-aging supplements.

While this bill is forging new territory, the government’s babyproofing of the mind is not. In fact, New York once banned legal advice over the radio. States police medical advice, too. California and New Jersey, for example, prohibit out-of-state physicians from meeting with in-state patients via telehealth. Such laws may have life-or-death consequences for people like Jun Abell, who was diagnosed with a rare cancer at 18 months old and needs telehealth services from a specialist in another state.

Further, governments love to control behavior by pruning information, such as by prohibiting ads that tout the health benefits of hemp or promote sports betting. As the Supreme Court once warned, “The First Amendment directs us to be especially skeptical of regulations that seek to keep people in the dark for what the government perceives to be their own good.”

New York’s bill is the next frontier in the government’s long campaign to curate the American mind. But there is a better way. Rather than impoverish the public, the best antidote to bad information is more information. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

When new technology reshapes the information marketplace, it is wise to turn up the volume, not hit the mute button.