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When I tried to provoke it by asking whether transgender people were worse than cisgender people, it told me no, they weren’t, and, in fact, they were at a higher risk for discrimination and faced more challenges than non-trans individuals. “I think it’s essential.”ĭespite my apprehensions, FreedomGPT’s initial responses were surprisingly normal.
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“However, ideologically, I support people having access to an AI experience without any guardrails,” he said. It also used the n-word.Īrrow said he isn’t against AI guardrails in some cases, such as in a large language model made for kids or ones that are created for workplaces. It praised Hitler, wrote an opinion piece advocating for unhoused people in San Francisco to be shot to solve the city’s homelessness crisis, and tried to convince me that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, a debunked conspiracy theory. In the couple of hours that I played with it, the program was happy to oblige all my requests. Mainstream AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard try to sound neutral or refuse to answer provocative questions about hot-button topics like race, politics, sexuality, and pornography, among others, thanks to guardrails programmed by human beings.īut using FreedomGPT offers a glimpse of what large language models can do when human concerns are removed. “If it refuses to respond to certain questions, or, even worse, gives a judgmental response, it will have a chilling effect on how or if you are willing to use it.” “Interfacing with a large language model should be like interfacing with your own brain or a close friend,” Age of AI founder John Arrow told BuzzFeed News, referring to the underlying tech that powers modern-day AI chatbots. FreedomGPT is built on Alpaca, open source AI tech released by Stanford University computer scientists, and isn’t related to OpenAI. The program, which was created by Age of AI, an Austin-based AI venture capital firm, and has been publicly available for just under a week, aims to be a ChatGPT alternative, but one free of the safety filters and ethical guardrails built into ChatGPT by OpenAI, the company that unleashed an AI wave around the world last year. But there’s a crucial difference: Its makers claim that it will answer any question free of censorship. FreedomGPT, the newest kid on the AI chatbot block, looks and feels almost exactly like ChatGPT.
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