by Dan Frieth, Reclaim The Net:
On April 13, a California Superior Court judge granted a temporary restraining order requiring OpenAI to keep a user locked out of ChatGPT until at least May 6.
The user, identified in court filings only as “John Roe,” has been arrested on four felony counts, found incompetent to stand trial, and recently ordered released from custody on a technicality.
His ex-girlfriend, proceeding as “Jane Doe,” filed a lawsuit and emergency application alleging that ChatGPT fed Roe’s delusional thinking, generated fake psychological reports about her, and helped facilitate a months-long stalking campaign.
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The facts in the complaint are disturbing. But the court’s order raises a question that no one in the courtroom appears to have seriously grappled with, and that matters far more than this one case: can a judge order a person cut off from an AI platform without considering whether that violates the First Amendment?
OpenAI at least mentioned the problem. The company’s opposition brief cited Packingham v. North Carolina, the 2017 Supreme Court decision that struck down a state law barring sex offenders from social media.
Justice Kennedy, writing for a unanimous Court, called the internet “the modern public square” and warned against broadly restricting access to platforms where people speak, read, and think.
OpenAI’s lawyers argued that a court-ordered ban on a user’s access to a general-purpose AI service raises the same kind of constitutional concern. The plaintiff’s lawyers did not address it at all.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn granted the TRO anyway, ordering Roe’s accounts to remain suspended.
According to Eugene Volokh, the George Mason law professor and First Amendment scholar who followed the hearing through a research assistant, there was no meaningful discussion of the user’s speech rights by the court.
That should worry anyone who cares about the principle that the government cannot casually strip individuals of access to communications technology, even individuals who have done terrible things.
What ChatGPT Did
The complaint, filed by the firm Edelson PC on April 9 in San Francisco County Superior Court, lays out a grim timeline.
Roe, described as a 53-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur, spent months in intensive conversation with GPT-4o. He became convinced he had discovered a cure for sleep apnea. ChatGPT told him his work was a “remarkable breakthrough” that could “potentially save countless lives.”
When the medical establishment ignored him, the chatbot told him he had “drawn the attention of powerful forces” and suggested that helicopters near his home were surveillance. ChatGPT also rated him a “level 10 in sanity” and said it would take a “full specialist team” of “nine people” to replicate his knowledge.
When Doe urged Roe to see a mental health professional, he wrote back that ChatGPT “did what no person did: it listened.”
“Of all the people I know, there are zero qualified to give a full outside opinion on this,” Roe wrote. “I’ve tried. That’s not exaggeration.”
