How machines came to speak: Media technologies and freedom of speechBy Jennifer Petersen, Duke University Press, 2022.

How Machines Came to Speak is organized around twentieth-century questions related to technological changes and alterations to the meaning of free speech. Exploring vital Supreme Court cases that faced questions of free speech and diverse forms of media, Jennifer Petersen sheds light on modern issues of digital media surrounding Artificial General Intelligence. Thinking often about the difference between crowds and publics, as well as issues of uncanny influence and social contagion, How Machines Came to Speak discusses questions about the First Amendment and aspects of constitutional interpretation that altered consistently over time and currently exist through much different forms that what originalism might generally afford.

Focusing on the twentieth century and issues of social influence and understandings of crowds, individuals, and media persuasions, How Machines Came to Speak sets an excellent tone for inserting legal studies into social and economic discussions of modern robotics and algorithms. As a history of media technologies, and how their stimulations upon society changed the very meanings of speaking, Petersen's work should be read in legal studies courses as well as classes on the history of media and technology. On the edge of Artificial General Intelligence with programs like ChatGPT, and with the use of artificial intelligence and advanced game theory applied at the highest levels of international relations, these questions of speech and persuasion upon human consciousness have never been more vital.

Chapter One explores how late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century businesses instigated a reimagining of free speech by asking the government to better define regulations upon new forms of media. Leading media corporations, especially with rising interests in film, requested the Supreme Court judge issues of discourse and public opinion to understand the limitations and powers of their new media. A reading of Mutual v. Ohio (1915) sets the stage for the chapter, as Petersen looks at legal briefs in the case to understand the roots of arguments concerning what in the film was considered to be influential upon society. At the time, speech in film was not deemed potent or influential enough to be greatly regulated, and free speech, as a constitutional protection, consequently remained a general matter only for printed and individually spoken words.

The second chapter moves the narrative along into the 1930s and 1940s to questions of mass influence that arose with new understandings of crowds and politics instigated in the public sphere due to international fascism and Bolshevism. Due to these political influences, and new ideas of racial inferiority, gestures, and eugenics that were part of fresh understandings of cultural influence, expressive conducts that became part of “speaking” were increasingly understood to be a part of filmic composition. Cases of the era analyzed specifically related to religious sects and their beliefs about patriotism, the American flag, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Moving forward into cases from the 1930s to the 1940s that illustrate these changes in broader media, Chapter Three addresses radio, film, and newsreel that influenced the public with enough force to be considered part of protected speech, while focusing specifically on issues of radio as framed within industrializing forms of corporate understandings of transmission.

Chapter Four discovers concepts of speakerless speech from the 1950s to the 1970s, whereby cases judged, from the precedent of radio and film in earlier decades, that an individual person was not necessary for speech to exist. The last chapter organizes the principles of speech in new ways to think about corporate rights to speech and the rights of computer communications of the late twentieth century. The conclusion continues to focus on how speech became radically disembodied from the individual throughout the timeline of How Machines Came to Speak.

Following earlier media scholarship from Lisa Gitelman on technology and influence, How Machines Came to Speak defines how speech moved from an individual who was protected in specific ways to speak and print in the public sphere through different forms of media that earned specific similar protections as part of the collective. Free speech as an individual right, faced with the advanced new media of Artificial General Intelligence, must again be restructured to accommodate the threatening spaces of the digital. What new posthuman and transhuman form of speaking means for human categories of speech, which are set out at the start of Petersen's work, is only to be seen and debated, as technologies only increasingly shape human understandings of what can be spoken.