Robots vs Free Speech
Friday, June 27, 2025
Robots vs Free Speech
Artificial intelligence: a popular topic around here—at least for me! To give credit where it’s due: Many CSLF readers have been a lot crabbier and more skeptical of the technology than I have, even if I don’t consider myself an all-out enthusiast.
That said, an aspect that is becoming clearer by the day is just how much AI/LLM technology is polluting and corrupting the worldwide database that used to be the open internet. Not that we got to this place from a perfect, ideal world. The internet was already home to a lot of questionable content right alongside the reputable stuff. By that I don’t just mean content consisting of opinions you or I might disagree with, but rather content that simply invents “research results” that describe research never undertaken anywhere. That is to say: purely deceptive or deranged nonsense.
There never has been any central authority to help naive online participants to distinguish truthful content from just plain lies, published to persuade people to favor choices against their own interests.
Today, though, automated text generation bots are hard at work for propagandists of all stripes—from commercial interests and their marketing campaigns, all the way to authoritarian enemy regimes hiding their crimes and generating text-based empires of lies. Those empires are now so large that they overwhelm the volume of what was previously understood to be true, or at least mostly harmless.
The novel idea behind the freedom of speech is that citizens in a free and open society can engage with different arguments, and eventually—in free discourse—the truth will win out. But is that even possible in an environment where computer tools generate such vast volumes of language? Is it possible in a computer-generated text environment where real people can be tricked into wasting their time arguing with computer bots?
Is it even possible for us to limit the possible damage caused by intentional deceptions, using a technology used with the intent of drowning out the truth, of overpowering sincere arguments set forth by legitimate participants in and citizens of the free and open society? How would we go about it? Do we have to close off the internet from the rest of the world? Or just from the authoritarian, police-state parts of the world that see themselves as our opposition, as our enemies and rivals?
Can all this corrupting influence be contained without giving up on the foundational principles of free speech?
If The Truth is something spoken a few times privately while the media landscape offers tidal waves of linguistic toxic waste, can free speech exist that is open to computerized language generation? Where do we run? Where do we hide?
There will eventually be a court case regarding whether computer generated text is speech or not. I do not believe it is, nor that it can be copyrighted. I am also not a judge, so who cares what I think.
I'm getting ready to head to the 6th inner ring of hell; airline travel. I know it is not going to be a good day when my seat reservation was changed from an aisle row to a middle seat, and I am being asked to give it up to fly out two days from now. I told them no, I have to meet students in 2 days, which is why I am flying out two days in advance. They were not happy campers.
Never a good start when they have overbooked an international flight.
Good questions. Its starting to look as if the AI horse has not only left the barn but has hopped on a rocket ship. A lot of disturbing trends and no good ideas on regulating the product.