FIRE’s Statement on AI and Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, gives his opening statement to Congress on AI and Freedom of Speech.

Text of Greg's Speech:

My name is Greg Lukianoff, and I am the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or “FIRE,” where I’ve worked for 23 years. FIRE is a nonpartisan, nonprofit that uses litigation, scholarship, and public outreach to defend and promote the value of free speech for all Americans. We proudly defend free speech regardless of a speaker’s viewpoint or identity, and we have represented people across the political spectrum.

I’m here to address the risk AI and AI regulation pose to freedom of speech and the creation of knowledge. We have good reason to be concerned. FIRE regularly fights government attempts to stifle speech on the internet.

FIRE is in federal court challenging a New York law that forces websites to “address” online speech that someone, somewhere finds humiliating or vilifying.

We’re challenging a new Utah law that requires age verification of all social media users.

We’ve raised concerns about the federal government funding development of AI tools to target speech including microaggressions.

And later this week, FIRE will file a brief with the Supreme Court explaining the danger of “jawboning” — the use of government pressure to force social media platforms to censor protected speech.

But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge.

A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas, and even questions are permitted in the name of “safety” or “alignment.”

I’ve dedicated my life to defending freedom of speech because it is an essential human right. However, free speech is more than that; it’s nothing less than essential to our ability to understand the world.

A giant step for human progress was the realization that, despite what our senses tell us, knowledge is hard to attain.

It's a never-ending, arduous, necessarily de-centralized process of testing and retesting, of chipping away at falsity to edge a bit closer to truth.

It’s not just about the proverbial “marketplace of ideas”; it’s about allowing information—independent of idea or argument—to flow freely so that we can hope to know the world as it really is. This means seeing value in expression even when it appears to be wrongheaded or useless.

This process has been aided by new technologies that have made communication easier. From the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, to phones and the internet: each one has accelerated the development of new knowledge by making it easier to share information.

But AI offers even greater liberating potential, empowered by First Amendment principles, including freedom to code, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry.

We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge.

AI’s potential is humbling; indeed, even frightening.

But as the history of the printing press shows, attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will fail.

Despite the profound disruption the printing press caused in Europe in the short term, the long-term contribution to art, science, and again, knowledge was without equal.

Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI.

Or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players.

The end result of pushing too hard on AI regulation will be the concentration of AI influence in an even smaller number of hands.

Far from reining in the government’s misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself.

“But why not just let OpenAI or a handful of existing AI engines dominate the space?” you may ask.

Trust in expertise and in higher education—another important developer of knowledge—has plummeted in recent years, due largely to self-inflicted wounds borne of the ideological biases shared by much of the expert class.

That same bias is often found baked into existing AI, and without competing AI models we may create a massive body of purported official facts that we can’t actually trust.

We’ve seen on campus that attempts to regulate hate speech have led to absurd results like punishing people for simply reading about controversial topics like racism; similarly, AI programs flag or refuse to answer questions about prohibited topics.

And, of course, the potential end result of America tying the hands of the greatest programmers in the world would be to lose our advantage to our most determined foreign adversaries.

But with decentralized development and use of AI, we have a better chance of defeating our staunchest rivals or even Skynet or Big Brother.

And it’s what gives us our best chance for understanding the world without being blinded by our current orthodoxies, superstitions, or darkest fears.

Thank you for the invitation to testify and I look forward to your questions.

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Dr. Drew’s Awakening About the Corporate Media

How many of us have had comparable stories?  Enough happened over the past few years, we heard so much from the corporate Media that was so highly coordinated yet it didn't add up and the media was stunningly incurious? Even about elephants in the room?

Dr. Drew (David Drew Pinsky):

I am open to everything now. I'm open to things that I never thought I would have been open to. I really think that the door fully came open. And I've realized that everything in the in the news is BS. Everything. There is nothing that I can consume on any legacy media that I can trust. And that is shocking. And that's disturbing. And it makes you wonder how long it's been going on for and I'm concerned, it might have been a very long time.

Dave Rubin:

What are the straws that broke the camel's back on that?

Dr. Drew:

My interview with RFK, Jr. He was so reasonable and so smart, and he had so many interesting ideas and enlightened me to this cozy relationship between the regulators and the pharma companies, which I really wasn't aware of. I mean, I can't let a pharma company representative into my office to give me a pen with a drug name on it, and yet those guys are living together and cross-pollinating. I mean, that's mind boggling to me. [RFK, Jr.] had a very sensible ... didn't necessarily fully agree with it, but a sensible idea about vaccine research that he would like to put forward. Not that vaccines are bad. His family's all vaccinated, my family's all vaccinated. And at the end of that interview, he said to me . . . "Oh, my God, Drew, you are so courageous to talk to me." It blew me back in my chair. I thought, I need courage to have a conversation with an adult in a public setting?

And he was right. This is a time where I didn't realize how much speech was being suppressed. How much was being manipulated, how much. Then what happened after that was the Twitter files and I started seeing what's going on. And it's just, it's just been to me, this is all reprehensible. And what has happened as a result, I don't think I've shifted my political views. I've just really, I never imagined I'd be in this point in my life at this age and place in my career. Freedom fighting and the courage to stand up for it have been the most important things in my life right now. And that's crazy. That is crazy. I live in the United States of America and I have to worry about freedoms. I'm gonna fight for freedom. That is an insanity and I'm hoping it's something that will pass soon.

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Robert Malone Analyzes a Self-Serving “Limited Hangout” Regarding mRNA

Robert Malone offers this definition of "limited hangout":

A limited hangout is a propaganda technique of displaying a subset of the available information. It involves deliberately revealing some information to try to confuse and/or prevent discovery of other information.

It misdirects an incautious audience, because information needs a context for correct interpretation. Subtly omitting information changes the interpretation of the surrounding information.

A modified limited hangout goes further by slightly changing the information disclosed. Commercially-controlled media is often a form of limited hangout, although it often also modifies information and so can represent a modified limited hangout.

Why is this important? Because "limited hangouts" are ubiquitous these days. They are a common tactic of those who use propaganda and censorship to create false consensuses and prevent robust national discussion of critically important national issues. When they are caught red-handed, they offer only a tiny subset of information, which has the psychological effect of satiating the audience, causing use to think that the full story has been disclosed. The cleverly disclose a tiny part of what is often their own misconduct and complicity in order to gain just enough credibility that they can they use that ill-gained credibility as a trojan horse for the next chapters of their misconduct.

Robert Malone takes a look at a very credible and scholarly-looking article, identifying it as a limited hangout, point by point. Here's the article:

“Lipid nanoparticle structural components, production methods, route of administration and proteins produced from complexed mRNAs all present toxicity concerns.”

Bitounis, D. et al. Strategies to reduce the risks of mRNA drug and vaccine toxicity. Nat Rev Drug Discov. 23 January 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41573-023-00859-3; PMID: 38263456

Here is an excerpt from Malone's article, his take-away
In this recent review article (23 January, 2024), Bitounis et al. provide a partial disclosure and examination of known risks and toxicities associated with the modified messenger ribonucleic acid/lipid nanoparticle pharmaceutical delivery platform. In general, what makes this publication particularly remarkable is that (collectively) the authors have significant employment or other ties to Moderna therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company whose very name (MODified RNA) indicates its corporate dependency on the feasibility of this technology. As a veteran of prior biopharmaceutical corporations, it is inconceivable to me that these authors do not have pre-existing restrictive non-disclosure agreements with Moderna, and therefore it is highly likely that Moderna pre-approved this publication.

Therefore, my most generous interpretation of the overall intent of the article is that this article summarizes and represents information concerning risks and toxicities of this platform technology which Moderna wishes to have disclosed in a manner which puts the firm, its activities and the underlying platform technology in the best possible light. A less generous interpretation of intent is that this article represents a subtle form of propaganda strategy commonly referred to as a limited hangout.

The essay includes extensive speculation concerning how emerging new technologies such as artificial intelligence and organoids (simplified tissue culture structures mimicking an organ, that are derived from stem cells), as well as well established ‘high tech” approaches such as single cell sequencing can be used to minimize animal model use (a specific NIH objective). They are intended to facilitate more efficient pharmaceutical development and toxicologic analysis of modified-mRNA drug and vaccine development technologies.

Through the jaded eyes of this highly experienced proposal reviewer, this mostly reads like a forward looking justification for increased investment in a variety of expensive new pharmaco-toxicology infrastructure advances which would be in the financial and professional interest of the authors, while avoiding and overlooking time tested approaches to characterizing the profound and wide ranging toxicities of these pharmaceutical preparations.

In other words, this reads as an extended justification for spending a lot of money on new goodies for pharmacologists and toxicologists while avoiding the obvious and less sexy basics that still have yet to be performed and reported.

I highly recommend reading Malone's point-by-point analysis to understand how a limited hangout functions.

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The Many Ways that U.S. Public Health Officials Failed Americans

Who could have predicted a few years ago that when the U.S. encountered a pandemic, the highest ranking public health officials would throw away their playbook for how to deal with a pandemic. It would be as though they forgot everything they had studied for decades. They would make shit up. They would pretend that they knew things when they didn't. They would downplay the risks of the economic shutdown (which they pushed) and exaggerate the risk of COVID. The vaccine manufacturers are hiding the raw data regarding vaccine efficacy. The current big disgraceful thing is that these same powers-that-be want to make sure that we are not getting free flowing data regarding injuries and deaths caused by the COVID vaccine. National Review has recently published this summary of many (but not all) of the failures of U.S. public health officials. The article is "When Science Is Not Science," and here's an excerpt:

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant...

When prominent virologists expressed concern that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 might have been engineered at and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Fauci and Collins helped draft, publish, and promote a letter/article refuting the lab-leak hypothesis, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” on March 17, 2020, in the prominent journal Nature Medicine. The article unequivocally stated “that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Fauci and Collins would repeatedly cite the article as proof that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a natural origin, as if the article had been published independently of their efforts.

It is as if the U.S. has been led by a bunch of frightened high schoolers who knew nothing about pandemics. Further, the powers that be (including the public health establishment) would make damned sure that we censored all dissent, concocting a false consensus. We're hearing all kinds of rationalization now, including from Francis Collins, but it is woeful and shameful. Most Americans are voting with their feet now and not getting any more boosters. U.S. public health officials have earned this intense disrespect.

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