Key Points
If in the coming years we wind up using AI the way most commentators expect, by leaning on it to outsource a lot of our content and judgment calls, I dont think companies will be able to escape some form of liability," says Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who has written about these issues..
(In short, if you say something defamatory about your neighbor on Facebook, they can sue you, but not Meta.) This law was foundational to the development of the early internet and is, arguably, one reason that many of todays biggest tech companies grew in the U.S., and not elsewhere..
I spoke with several legal experts across the ideological spectrum, and none expect that Section 230 will protect companies from lawsuits over the outputs of generative AI, which now include not just text but also images, music and video..
And as companies like OpenAI argue in legal briefs over whether scraping copyrighted content from the internet counts as theft of intellectual property, they may actually be hurting their case that they arent responsible for the content their systems produce..
If making AI chatbots and things that resemble them leads to too many lawsuits, the companies developing the underlying AI technology may simply cut off access to it, says Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at UCLA..
