Do you lose free speech rights if you speak using a computer?

[a1pha]

Original New York Times article, June 19, 2012: Free Speech for Computers?

DO machines speak? If so, do they have a constitutional right to free speech?

Defenders of Google’s position have argued that since humans programmed the computers that are “speaking,” the computers have speech rights as if by digital inheritance. But the fact that a programmer has the First Amendment right to program pretty much anything he likes doesn’t mean his creation is thereby endowed with his constitutional rights. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster could walk and talk, but that didn’t qualify him to vote in the doctor’s place.

Ars Technica coverage of the article, June 22, 2012: Do you lose free speech rights if you speak using a computer?

Protecting a computer’s "speech" is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny.

Wu's argument depends on drawing a sharp distinction between constitutionally protected human speech and computer speech that is unprotected by the First Amendment. But closer examination demonstrates how nonsensical this distinction is