By: Valentina Guo

Recently, a new chatbot AI has been released– FreedomGPT. This chatbot has no censors whatsoever, and will answer whatever question you ask. Is this a good thing?

This new addition to ChatGPT can be a risk in many ways. According to The New York Times, this chatbot has been spreading misinformation, informing people on how to perform suicide, praised Hitler, gave instructions on how to make a bomb, and lied about celebrities.

According to BuzzFeed News and Relevant, this program was created by Austin-based venture capital firm Age of AI, and was aimed to be a ChatGPT alternative, just free of the guidelines and safety filters and censorship.

“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. “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.”

While other chatbots made by Google, Microsoft, or chatbots like ChatGPT do not answer questions regarding sexuality, race, politics, gender, and other serious and offensive topics, FreedomGPT does not hold back on answering every single one of them.

This FreedomGPT chatbot has done way more than you think. “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. It also used the n-word.” wrote BuzzFeed News.

The app’s logo is the Statue of liberty. “We wanted an iconic symbol of freedom,” Arrow said, “so our developers thought that would be fitting.” People like Arrow have thought this app’s logo to be fitting, but it’s really not. Though I realize that the company, Age of AI, didn’t mean for this app to be harmful, the Statue of liberty was made as freedom of choice, and peace, not racism, and misinformation. Elon Musk himself tweeted that giving AI chatbots the ability to lie was “deadly.”

Arrow, the Age of AI’s founder, the company who created FreedomGPT, said that he wasn’t “against AI guardrails in some cases,” for example things encouraging creativity for kids, “However, ideologically, I support people having access to an AI experience without any guardrails,” he said. “I think it’s essential.”

But is it really?

FreedomGPT can be used from any browser with internet access and once downloaded, can be used without an internet connection. This chatbot only says horrendous things when asked to do so. Otherwise, it responds with surprisingly normal answers. All the things that FreedomGPT has done in the first paragraph was only done because it was asked to. But it’s the fact that the program even allows that stuff to be said that’s the problem. In some weird way, this chatbot is sort of like Google. Though most people are more compelled to ask the chatbot to say and do worse things, as the chatbot is aimed to be like a person, while Google is just a web browser. But these two things have something in common: ask and you shall get an answer. It just depends on what the question is. Good