Free-speech battles are being fought everywhere: on our campuses, in our newsrooms, and on social media. But the most important free speech debate isn’t about protesters’ rights at university or moderation policies on X. It’s about whether robots should have First Amendment rights.
Let me explain. Within a few years, I expect most of the written words produced in the United States to come from advanced artificial intelligence models. These models are already better writers than almost everyone, and they know more, too. Their stylistic quirks are being improved. Their grammar is close to perfect and, unlike us mortal writers, they don’t get tired.
Humans may still be around as vision setters and editors. But I soon expect more than half of the content of a random nonfiction book you might pick up at Barnes & Noble to be written by computers, not humans. In a newspaper or online opinion site, maybe 80 percent. Even if the number of human writers and columnists does not decline, it will be impossible to resist adding a lot of high-quality machine content, at very low cost.
