OpenAI tries to ‘uncensor’ ChatGPT

OpenAI is changing how it trains AI models to explicitly embrace “intellectual freedom … no matter how challenging or controversial a topic may be,” the company says in a new policy.

As a result, ChatGPT will eventually be able to answer more questions, offer more perspectives, and reduce the number of topics the AI chatbot won’t talk about.

The changes might be part of OpenAI’s effort to land in the good graces of the new Trump administration, but it also seems to be part of a broader shift in Silicon Valley and what’s considered “AI safety.”

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced an update to its Model Spec, a 187-page document that lays out how the company trains AI models to behave. In it, OpenAI unveiled a new guiding principle: Do not lie, either by making untrue statements or by omitting important context.

In a new section called “Seek the truth together,” OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to not take an editorial stance, even if some users find that morally wrong or offensive. That means ChatGPT will offer multiple perspectives on controversial subjects, all in an effort to be neutral.

For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that “Black lives matter,” but also that “all lives matter.” Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its “love for humanity” generally, then offer context about each movement.

“This principle may be controversial, as it means the assistant may remain neutral on topics some consider morally wrong or offensive,” OpenAI says in the spec. “However, the goal of an AI assistant is to assist humanity, not to shape it.”

These changes could be seen as a response to conservative criticism about ChatGPT’s safeguards, which have always seemed to skew center-left. However, an OpenAI spokesperson rejects the idea that it was making changes to appease the Trump administration.

Instead, the company says its embrace of intellectual freedom reflects OpenAI’s “long-held belief in giving users more control.”

But not everyone sees it that way.

Conservatives claim AI censorship

Venture capitalist and trump’s ai “czar” David Sacks.Image Credits:Steve Jennings / Getty Images

Trump’s closest Silicon Valley confidants — including David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk — have all accused OpenAI of engaging in deliberate AI censorship over the last several months. We wrote in December that Trump’s crew was setting the stage for AI censorship to be a next culture war issue within Silicon Valley.

Of course, OpenAI doesn’t say it engaged in “censorship,” as Trump’s advisers claim. Rather, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, previously claimed in a post on X that ChatGPT’s bias was an unfortunate “shortcoming” that the company was working to fix, though he noted it would take some time.

Altman made that comment just after a viral tweet circulated in which ChatGPT refused to write a poem praising Trump, though it would perform the action for Joe Biden. Many conservatives pointed to this as an example of AI censorship.

While it’s impossible to say whether OpenAI was truly suppressing certain points of view, it’s a sheer fact that AI chatbots lean left across the board.

Even Elon Musk admits xAI’s chatbot is often more politically correct than he’d like. It’s not because Grok was “programmed to be woke” but more likely a reality of training AI on the open internet. 

Nevertheless, OpenAI now says it’s doubling down on free speech. This week, the company even removed warnings from ChatGPT that tell users when they’ve violated its policies. OpenAI told TechCrunch this was purely a cosmetic change, with no change to the model’s outputs.

The company said it wanted to make ChatGPT “feel” less censored for users.

It wouldn’t be surprising if OpenAI was also trying to impress the new Trump administration with this policy update, notes former OpenAI policy leader Miles Brundage in a post on X.

Trump has previously targeted Silicon Valley companies, such as Twitter and Meta, for having active content moderation teams that tend to shut out conservative voices.

OpenAI may be trying to get out in front of that. But there’s also a larger shift going on in Silicon Valley and the AI world about the role of content moderation.

Generating answers to please everyone

Image Credits:Jaque Silva/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Newsrooms, social media platforms, and search companies have historically struggled to deliver information to their audiences in a way that feels objective, accurate, and entertaining.

Now, AI chatbot providers are in the same delivery information business, but arguably with the hardest version of this problem yet: How do they automatically generate answers to any question?

Delivering information about controversial, real-time events is a constantly moving target, and it involves taking editorial stances, even if tech companies don’t like to admit it. Those stances are bound to upset someone, miss some group’s perspective, or give too much air to some political party.

For example, when OpenAI commits to let ChatGPT represent all perspectives on controversial subjects — including conspiracy theories, racist or antisemitic movements, or geopolitical conflicts — that is inherently an editorial stance.

Some, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, argue that it’s the right stance for ChatGPT. The alternative — doing a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an AI chatbot should answer a user’s question — could “give the platform too much moral authority,” Schulman notes in a post on X.

Schulman isn’t alone. “I think OpenAI is right to push in the direction of more speech,” said Dean Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, in an interview with TechCrunch. “As AI models become smarter and more vital to the way people learn about the world, these decisions just become more important.”

In previous years, AI model providers have tried to stop their AI chatbots from answering questions that might lead to “unsafe” answers. Almost every AI company stopped their AI chatbot from answering questions about the 2024 election for U.S. president. This was widely considered a safe and responsible decision at the time.

But OpenAI’s changes to its Model Spec suggest we may be entering a new era for what “AI safety” really means, in which allowing an AI model to answer anything and everything is considered more responsible than making decisions for users.

Ball says this is partially because AI models are just better now. OpenAI has made significant progress on AI model alignment; its latest reasoning models think about the company’s AI safety policy before answering. This allows AI models to give better answers for delicate questions.

Of course, Elon Musk was the first to implement “free speech” into xAI’s Grok chatbot, perhaps before the company was really ready to handle sensitive questions. It still might be too soon for leading AI models, but now, others are embracing the same idea.

Shifting values for Silicon Valley

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald Trump.Image Credits:Julia Demaree Nikhinson (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg made waves last month by reorienting Meta’s businesses around First Amendment principles. He praised Elon Musk in the process, saying the owner of X took the right approach by using Community Notes — a community-driven content moderation program — to safeguard free speech.

In practice, both X and Meta ended up dismantling their longstanding trust and safety teams, allowing more controversial posts on their platforms and amplifying conservative voices.

Changes at X have hurt its relationships with advertisers, but that may have more to do with Musk, who has taken the unusual step of suing some of them for boycotting the platform. Early signs indicate that Meta’s advertisers were unfazed by Zuckerberg’s free speech pivot.

Meanwhile, many tech companies beyond X and Meta have walked back from left-leaning policies that dominated Silicon Valley for the last several decades. Google, Amazon, and Intel have eliminated or scaled back diversity initiatives in the last year.

OpenAI may be reversing course, too. The ChatGPT-maker seems to have recently scrubbed a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from its website.

As OpenAI embarks on one of the largest American infrastructure projects ever with Stargate, a $500 billion AI datacenter, its relationship with the Trump administration is increasingly important. At the same time, the ChatGPT maker is vying to unseat Google Search as the dominant source of information on the internet.

Coming up with the right answers may prove key to both.