  As one of the most enduring metaphors within legal discourse, the marketplace
of ideas has wielded considerable influence over the jurisprudential landscape
for decades. A century after the inception of this theory, ChatGPT emerged as a
revolutionary technological advancement in the twenty-first century. This
research finds that ChatGPT effectively manifests the marketplace metaphor. It
not only instantiates the promises envisaged by generations of legal scholars
but also lays bare the perils discerned through sustained academic critique.
Specifically, the workings of ChatGPT and the marketplace of ideas theory
exhibit at least four common features: arena, means, objectives, and flaws.
These shared attributes are sufficient to render ChatGPT historically the most
qualified engine for actualizing the marketplace of ideas theory.
  The comparison of the marketplace theory and ChatGPT merely marks a starting
point. A more meaningful undertaking entails reevaluating and reframing both
internal and external AI policies by referring to the accumulated experience,
insights, and suggestions researchers have raised to fix the marketplace
theory. Here, a pivotal issue is: should truth-seeking be set as the goal of AI
content governance? Given the unattainability of the absolute truth-seeking
goal, I argue against adopting zero-risk policies. Instead, a more judicious
approach would be to embrace a knowledge-based alternative wherein large
language models (LLMs) are trained to generate competing and divergent
viewpoints based on sufficient justifications. This research also argues that
so-called AI content risks are not created by AI companies but are inherent in
the entire information ecosystem. Thus, the burden of managing these risks
should be distributed among different social actors, rather than being solely
shouldered by chatbot companies.
