Vanderbilt University

• Still, the conversation on AI ignores another crucial issue: What is the AI industry’s approach to free speech, and does it embrace international free speech standards?
• In practice, this means that AI chatbots often censor output when dealing with issues the companies deem controversial.
• Without a solid culture of free speech, the companies producing generative AI tools are likely to continue to face backlash in these increasingly polarized times.

Vague and broad use policies

• Companies issue policies to set the rules for how people can use their models.
• With international human rights law as a benchmark, we found that companies’ misinformation and hate speech policies are too vague and expansive.
• Our analysis found that companies’ hate speech policies contain extremely broad prohibitions.
• To show how vague and broad use policies can affect users, we tested a range of prompts on controversial topics.
• More recently, India confronted Google after Gemini noted that some experts consider the policies of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to be fascist.

Free speech culture

• If they serve a global audience, they may want to avoid content that is offensive in any region.
• This means society has an interest in ensuring such policies adequately protect free speech.
• Even where a similar legal obligation does not apply to AI providers, we believe that the companies’ influence should require them to adopt a free speech culture.
• At least two of the companies we focused on – Google and Anthropic – have recognized as much.

Outright refusals

• Therefore, users’ exposure to hate speech and misinformation from generative AI will typically be limited unless they specifically seek it.
• This is unlike social media, where people have much less control over their own feeds.
• Stricter controls, including on AI-generated content, may be justified at the level of social media since they distribute content publicly.
• Refusals to generate content not only affect fundamental rights to free speech and access to information.

• The Future of Free Speech is a non-partisan, independent think tank that has received limited financial support from Google for specific projects.
• In all cases, The Future of Free Speech retains full independence and final authority for its work, including research pursuits, methodology, analysis, conclusions, and presentation.
• The Future of Free Speech is a non-partisan, independent think tank that has received limited financial support from Google for specific projects.