Freedom House Governments Harness AI to Reinforce Censorship A dvances in generative AI may prove a double-edged sword for authoritarian governments. Today’s popular chatbots could provide people in closed environments with indirect access to uncensored information sources, echoing the early promise of news websites and social media. But some of the most authoritarian regimes are already responding to this potential with new restrictions. The history of internet governance suggests that more states will quickly adapt their legal frameworks and technical mechanisms to control how their citizens interact with these emerging digital products. As some governments are moving to restrict access to generative AI or control its outputs, many are also forcing companies to use AI to remove content from their platforms at a speed and scale that would be impossible for human censors or less sophisticated technical methods. These censorship requirements tend to concentrate on content that is deemed illegal under local law—a category that, in many countries, includes expression on political, social, or religious topics that should be protected under international human rights standards. Innovations in the AI field have allowed governments to carry out more precise censorship that is less detectable, minimizing public backlash and reducing the political cost to those in power. While AI has allowed for more subtle and efficient forms of content removal, blunt censorship remains pervasive. Shutdowns of internet service and blocks on entire social media platforms continued to be key tactics of information control around the world. The number of countries where governments imposed outright blocking on websites that hosted political, social, and religious speech reached an unprecedented high of 41 this year. Democracies are not immune to this trend. States that have long been defenders of internet freedom imposed censorship or flirted with proposals to do so, an unhelpful response to genuine threats of foreign interference, disinformation, and harassment. @freedomhouse Innovations in the AI field have allowed governments to carry out more precise censorship that is less detectable, minimizing public backlash and reducing the political cost to those in power. Generative AI draws authoritarian attention This coverage period’s newly launched text-based generative AI applications like ChatGPT and Bard may allow users to sidestep government censorship, because the systems are trained on data from the global internet, including information that is typically suppressed in authoritarian states. The most technically sophisticated authoritarian regimes grappled with this risk, and some attempted to restrict access to the new chatbots. In February 2023, Chinese regulators ordered tech conglomerates Tencent and Ant Group to ensure that ChatGPT is not integrated into or accessible via their services, including through the third-party apps on their app stores. Apple removed over 100 ChatGPT-like apps from its Chinese app store to comply with local rules. Similarly, Vietnamese officials warned citizens against using ChatGPT, asserting that it “distorts,” smears, and opposes the state and the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Early research indicates that chatbots’ outputs reflect the censorship embedded in their training data, a reminder that generative AI tools influenced by state-controlled information sources could serve as force multipliers for censorship. Developers in some repressive countries have moved to create their own chatbots. For instance, several Russian companies—including Yandex and Sistemma—have freedomhouse.org 13