this is a category error, but i suspect it's one we're going to see all over the place.

so, when a robot speaks, who or what is speaking? is it the robot? or is it the programmer?

if you've never programmed anything, you might be forgiven for looking at a robot speaking, and saying "this speech belongs to the robot". it's all very anthropomorphical, so it's easy for us to trick ourselves.

but, a robot is no more in control of it's speech than a cartoon character is. and, do you argue that homer or ariel or spongebob or fred fucking flintstone deserve free speech? no - because we know that cave men and talking sponges and mermaids and high school dropouts with mansions don't actually exist in real life, that their speech was written by a human entity.

we then argue that the humans deserve speech rights, through the medium of the characters they've created. and, we all agree on this point.

similarly, robots do not say anything they were not programmed to. even the ones using the ai we have are unable to actually think: they can only repeat what they've been programmed to repeat, via whatever instruction, from whatever heuristic. so, the question we need to ask is whether programmers deserve free speech rights through the medium of the characters they create inside the robot. and, the answer is that they do - because they are human beings, and this is innate.

as an easily confused human, you just need to get that reality clear to you: that this robot speaking to you is not a legal person, does not have a self, and is only capable of saying what it's been told to say. once you do that, you see it's a non-issue.

and, you also know who to go after should the robot be programmed problematically.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/robots-deserve-a-first-amendment-right-to-free-speech.html

jgmeet singh must cut his beard.