How to fight back against government censorship of chatbots. By Jacob Mchangama “Well, then you need to shut it down.” That was Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s reaction when a Google executive explained during a recent Senate hearing that large language models (LLMs) sometimes “hallucinate” and generate false information. The Tennessee senator was outraged that Google’s […]
China is exporting its AI governance model; democracies must act now or risk letting others define the future of speech. By Jordi Calvet-Bademunt and Jacob Mchangama “China is going to win the AI race,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned recently. In a follow-up statement released shortly after making that bold proclamation, Huang softened his tone, […]
Has Europe’s crackdown on free speech become a bigger threat to democracy than ‘the extremists’ it seeks to contain? By Jacob Mchangama On the morning of November 26, three armed police officers showed up at the Berlin apartment of American playwright C.J. Hopkins. They presented a warrant, seized his computer, and questioned both him and […]
By Cathy Young During the free-speech skirmishes of the last decade, the battle lines were often drawn in a way that placed heterodox liberals and centrists on the same side as conservatives in opposing censorious progressivism. But those lines have been redrawn in recent months, after the Trump administration began aggressively targeting disfavoured expression, from […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Jordi Calvet-Bademunt The Trump administration is waging a public crusade against so-called “woke AI,” emphasizing the need for “neutral models” that engage in “truth seeking” instead of promoting certain (left-leaning) biases. We recently warned that such actions pose significant risks to free expression. Many Europeans are likely to roll their eyes […]
By Ruth Green “Freedom of speech belongs to humans, not to artificial intelligence,” a Polish government minister said in July. [ . . . ] This concept has been thrown into sharp relief as humans become increasingly reliant on generative AI (genAI) tools for day-to-day tasks and to quench curiosity. This places AI at a […]
By Sammy Westfall The Macrons are fighting the defamation claims in France’s criminal courts. “While France prioritizes reputation protections, the U.S. champions a national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’” said Jacob Mchangama, executive director of the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University, […]
By Adam Růžička “Hate is hatred – no one should be exposed to it,” said European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. The fight against hatred is growing in Europe, but critics point out that sanctions are both ineffective and threaten freedom of speech. We discussed the topic with Natalie Alkiviada, a leading expert on […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Jordi Calvet-Bademunt This week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly defended his company against White House artificial intelligence czar David Sacks’ accusation that Anthropic is building “woke AI.” In other words, the leader of a $183 billion AI company found himself reassuring the current administration that his company’s AI chatbot wouldn’t spread […]
By Jacob Mchangama [ . . . ] The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that […]