Uncensored chatbots provoke a fracas over free speech – The Denver Post

Artificial intelligence chatbots have lied about notable figures, pushed partisan messages, spewed misinformation or even advised users on how to commit suicide.

To mitigate the tools’ most obvious dangers, companies such as Google and OpenAI have carefully added controls that limit what the tools can say.

Now, a new wave of chatbots, developed far from the epicenter of the AI boom, are coming online without many of those guardrails — setting off a polarizing free-speech debate over whether chatbots should be moderated, and who should decide.

“This is about ownership and control,” Eric Hartford, a developer behind WizardLM-Uncensored, an unmoderated chatbot, wrote in a blog post. “If I ask my model a question, I want an answer, I do not want it arguing with me.”

Several uncensored and loosely moderated chatbots have sprung to life in recent months under names such as GPT4All and FreedomGPT. Many were created for little or no money by independent programmers or teams of volunteers, who successfully replicated the methods first described by AI researchers. Only a few groups made their models from the ground up. Most groups work from existing language models, only adding extra instructions to tweak how the technology responds to prompts.

The uncensored chatbots offer tantalizing new possibilities. Users can download an unrestricted chatbot on their own computers, using it without the watchful eye of Big Tech. They could then train it on private messages, personal emails or secret documents without risking a privacy breach. Volunteer programmers can develop clever new add-ons, moving faster — and perhaps more haphazardly — than larger companies dare.

But the risks appear just as numerous — and some say they present dangers that must be addressed. Misinformation watchdogs, already wary of how mainstream chatbots can spew falsehoods, have raised alarms about how unmoderated chatbots will supercharge the threat. These models could produce descriptions of child pornography, hateful screeds or false content, experts warned.

Although large corporations have barreled ahead with AI tools, they have also wrestled with how to protect their reputations and maintain investor confidence. Independent AI developers seem to have few such concerns. And even if they did, critics said, they may not have the resources to fully address them.

“The concern is completely legitimate and clear: These chatbots can and will say anything if left to their own devices,” said Oren Etzioni, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. “They’re not going to censor themselves. So, now the question becomes: What is an appropriate solution in a society that prizes free speech?”

Dozens of independent and open source AI. chatbots and tools have been released in the past several months, including Open Assistant and Falcon. HuggingFace, a large repository of open source AIs, hosts more than 240,000 open source models.

“This is going to happen in the same way that the printing press was going to be released and the car was going to be invented,” Hartford said in an interview. “Nobody could have stopped it. Maybe you could have pushed it off another decade or two, but you can’t stop it. And nobody can stop this.”

Artificial intelligence chatbots have lied about notable figures, pushed partisan messages, spewed misinformation or even advised users on how to commit suicide.

To mitigate the tools’ most obvious dangers, companies such as Google and OpenAI have carefully added controls that limit what the tools can say.

Now, a new wave of chatbots, developed far from the epicenter of the AI boom, are coming online without many of those guardrails — setting off a polarizing free-speech debate over whether chatbots should be moderated, and who should decide.

“This is about ownership and control,” Eric Hartford, a developer behind WizardLM-Uncensored, an unmoderated chatbot, wrote in a blog post. “If I ask my model a question, I want an answer, I do not want it arguing with me.”

Several uncensored and loosely moderated chatbots have sprung to life in recent months under names such as GPT4All and FreedomGPT. Many were created for little or no money by independent programmers or teams of volunteers, who successfully replicated the methods first described by AI researchers. Only a few groups made their models from the ground up. Most groups work from existing language models, only adding extra instructions to tweak how the technology responds to prompts.

The uncensored chatbots offer tantalizing new possibilities. Users can download an unrestricted chatbot on their own computers, using it without the watchful eye of Big Tech. They could then train it on private messages, personal emails or secret documents without risking a privacy breach. Volunteer programmers can develop clever new add-ons, moving faster — and perhaps more haphazardly — than larger companies dare.

But the risks appear just as numerous — and some say they present dangers that must be addressed. Misinformation watchdogs, already wary of how mainstream chatbots can spew falsehoods, have raised alarms about how unmoderated chatbots will supercharge the threat. These models could produce descriptions of child pornography, hateful screeds or false content, experts warned.

Although large corporations have barreled ahead with AI tools, they have also wrestled with how to protect their reputations and maintain investor confidence. Independent AI developers seem to have few such concerns. And even if they did, critics said, they may not have the resources to fully address them.

“The concern is completely legitimate and clear: These chatbots can and will say anything if left to their own devices,” said Oren Etzioni, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. “They’re not going to censor themselves. So, now the question becomes: What is an appropriate solution in a society that prizes free speech?”

Dozens of independent and open source AI. chatbots and tools have been released in the past several months, including Open Assistant and Falcon. HuggingFace, a large repository of open source AIs, hosts more than 240,000 open source models.

“This is going to happen in the same way that the printing press was going to be released and the car was going to be invented,” Hartford said in an interview. “Nobody could have stopped it. Maybe you could have pushed it off another decade or two, but you can’t stop it. And nobody can stop this.”