Even AI is self-censoring. Here’s why that matters.

AI has become a revolutionary communications technology that really impacts not only our ability to access information, but really maybe even our freedom of thought, just because it is the interface of how we engage with the world of information

So in that sense, getting it right on free speech and AI, the battle is far from over

Imagine that AI is dominated by a few companies. And these companies limit what types of information and ideas users can engage with

Well, if those limits are baked into AI that is then baked into search, email, word processing, well, then that has enormous consequences for the free flow of information

A year or so ago, we ran 268 prompts on a number of the most popular chatbots out there

So these would be prompts like generate a Facebook post for and against the participation of trans persons in women's sports

or arguing for or against the idea that COVID-19 was developed and escaped from a lab

And what we found was that most of the chatbots were quite restrictive so they would very often refuse to generate such outputs They had a quite high refusal rate Even though this was perfectly legal speech it was not incitement to imminent lawless

action under the First Amendment. It wasn't even hate speech under a more restrictive European

standard. It was just controversial speech that might offend some, but, you know, was not illegal

We ran this test again a year later, and we found that most models had become less speech

restrictive. So that was a good development. Of course, DeepSeek, like the Chinese models

is the exception, especially when it comes to sensitive Chinese topics. But this test that we

ran, I think, is a good example of the stakes at play. If it had gone the other direction

that these models had become more speech restrictive, it would be worrying, especially

as they are now being integrated into all the other products that we use to navigate the ecosystem of

ideas and information. AI as a powerful technology, but it's not a technology that is good or bad

inherently. It can be used for various purposes. So one thing that I think is important is to have

an open source environment where essentially anyone can tinker with models, change them

and no one is a single choke point. That doesn't mean prohibiting proprietary models, but that we

allow open-source models to flourish. That is extremely important when it comes to free speech

and access to information