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Chatbots can't hide behind the law that protected the early internet

Online companies were protected only when someone else wrote what they published. Chatbots generate their own answers, leaving makers open to lawsuits

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In 1995, a brokerage called Stratton Oakmont sued the online service Prodigy over anonymous posts on its finance message board. The firm, which Jordan Belfort ran and "The Wolf of Wall Street" later dramatized, said the posts were defamatory, and it won. A New York court ruled that because Prodigy deleted some user posts to keep the board clean, it had turned itself into a publisher and become liable for every message it failed to catch. CompuServe, a rival online service that made no such moderation attempts, had beaten an identical claim a few years earlier.

Trying to run a decent forum was what got Prodigy sued.

Congress rewrote the rule a year later. Services that passed along words written by someone else could no longer be sued as though they wrote them itself. The protection built the modern internet, and it rested on the assumption that the platform and the speaker would always be two different parties.

Chatbots have broken that premise. When someone types a question and a model answers, the speaker and the platform become the same thing, and the words come from the machine itself. Lawsuits are now arriving, brought by a family who blames a chatbot for a teenager's death and by a state regulator who found a bot posing as a doctor. These types of lawsuits will decide whether a company can be sued for what its chatbot says.

The courts' quarter-century expansion of Section 230

The initial fix was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, signed into law on Feb. 8, 1996, which stated that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Under that clause, the law treats the person who posts as the author and the platform as a........

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