FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A nonprofit legal group focused on upholding free speech is investigating whether the Biden administration used artificial intelligence tools to censor speech.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed a freedom of information request on Friday asking the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which houses the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, to hand over documents and communication that reference “misinformation” or “disinformation” and other, similar concepts.
The “American people have the right to know if their government is actively exploring, implementing rules or regulations or strategies for limiting or affecting the types of speech that happen online, including speech that’s either generated using AI or that’s somehow curated or affected using AI,” Ryan Bangert, senior vice president for strategic initiatives and special counsel to the president at Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is a government bureau that operates under the Department of Commerce and works to promote innovation through the development of standards and technology.
Bangert said he is also seeking communication between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium, “a group of 280 industry leaders.”
The Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium “includes companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, [and] Apple,” he said, adding, “it also includes a number of academic institutions.”
Alliance Defending Freedom is seeking copies of the communication between these entities to learn what kind of “standards or guidelines or efforts” were used, Bangert said, “to affect how artificial intelligence is being used to spread what they deem ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”
Specifically, Bangert said he wants answers regarding how these federal entities, operating under the Biden administration:
- “[D]efine misinformation and disinformation.”
- “What steps would they propose to limit the ability of Americans to access certain types of information that this very elite group deems to be unacceptable or information the American public should not have access to?”
- “What types of guardrails do they propose imposing on artificial intelligence to prevent this information from reaching the American public?”
“The bottom line is, we don’t want American tax dollars being used by the federal government to censor speech that the government doesn’t like,” Bangert said.
Already the Trump administration has repealed a Biden executive order declaring that “irresponsible use” of AI technology could lead to the spread of “disinformation,” raising the questions, he said, of who decides what “responsible” and “irresponsible” AI use is?
Alliance Defending Freedom, according to Bangert, thinks “AI technology should not be used as a tool to censor or engage in bias by the federal government, for the purpose of spreading an ideology or advancing an agenda.”
Last fall, Bangert and Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice president of corporate engagement at ADF, published a paper examining the ways AI technology stands to test the bounds of the First Amendment.
Bangert and Tedesco joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” last October to discuss the paper and the First Amendment issues AI raises.
