Tech Policy Podcast 414: Beware the Butlerian Jihad
Jul 21, 2025
Nico Perrino, Executive Vice President at FIRE and host of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, and Ari Cohn, Counsel lead for tech policy at FIRE, dig into pressing issues affecting technology and free speech. They discuss the end of the AI moratorium and its implications for regulation. The duo examines a controversial lawsuit involving an AI chatbot and its First Amendment rights, alongside the complexities of the FTC's censorship campaign and Europe's Digital Services Act, which threaten American freedom of expression.
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Episode notes
Preemption Shapes National AI Policy
- Preempting state AI rules matters because a patchwork of 50 different laws tends to push companies toward the most restrictive standard.
- That consolidation risk can let a few states set de facto national AI policy and harm innovation.
Regulation Can Skew Model Outputs
- Government-mandated fairness or disparate-impact rules could force LLMs to skew outputs and produce a distorted version of reality.
- That distortion risks cascading model collapse as flawed outputs feed future models and policies.
Labeling AI Output Non‑Speech Is Dangerous
- Courts considering whether AI outputs are speech risk misreading precedents like Justice Barrett's concurrence.
- Treating LLM output as nonexpressive would allow broad regulation of information generated by AI.
