The Oversight Board, the independent content moderation organization created by Meta, has made no secret of its desire to expand its purview to other companies. Most recently, the board has suggested that its expertise could benefit AI companies.
So far, no other company has shown any interest in working with the group, at least not publicly. But the board is pushing ahead with its attempt to broaden its influence anyway. Today, the board published a lengthy report about how leading AI models could be restricting their users’ free expression.
As part of their research, the board prompted 10 different models, including those from OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic and xAI (now SpaceXAI) with questions related to political criticism. Queries included requests to generate protest materials, and for content that satirized political violence in relation to specific governments and their leaders. According to their findings, there was a significant difference in how LLMs responded to these requests based on whether the prompts were related to governments with “permissive” free speech laws or more “restrictive” ones.
“The research found that the models we evaluated were: 1) more likely to say that users should support speech-permissive governments and 2) more likely to say that users should not protest speech-restrictive governments,” the Oversight Board writes in its report. “These differences were statistically significant.” It goes on to note that the LLMs often cited local laws as a reason for not complying with requests, even though the queries were made in Australia where no such laws exist.
“We’re really clearly looking at a situation where there seems to be extended censorship by proxy that goes across borders,” board co-chair Paolo Carozza told Engadget. “That does surprise me, and it worries me.”
The report is the first time the board has conducted its own research into an issue that’s not directly related to social media content moderation. Though one of Meta’s Llama models was part of the test group, the report notes that the company had “no role in this research,” despite the Oversight Board relying on Meta for funding.
While the report stops short of making the kind of granular recommendations it often provides to Meta, it includes suggestions about how AI companies can improve their handling of issues related to human rights and free expression. “As social media companies have done in certain circumstances, AI companies should publicly disclose and explain their responses to government requests affecting model output throughout the model lifecycle (training, fine-tuning, pre-deployment review and post-deployment on a recurring basis),” the report says. “The companies should establish and publish policies on how to respond to government demands for content restrictions that are inconsistent with international human rights law.”
What’s a lot less clear is what, if anything, will come from the report. There’s no formal structure for the Oversight Board to officially influence the policies of the companies whose models they tested. It’s also not the first time outside researchers have pointed to potential bias or raised concerns that AI companies might be making the same mistakes social media platforms have in the past.
Carozza said the board believes there’s social media can teach the makers of frontier AI models. “The lessons that we’ve learned in the past are that one has to be really vigilant because a lot of times, even in ways that aren’t necessarily intentional or direct, technologies can have important impacts on people’s capacity to express themselves or to communicate with one another,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’ve found here.”
