Freedom of Intelligence, Democratized
The New Intellectual Freedom
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of information | May 24, 2025 | Vol. 3, Issue 28
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively. Thank you, new readers, and those returning. I appreciate you!
As I was finishing this essay, someone nearby was playing Yanni's 1997 performance at the Taj Mahal (India). I paused when I heard him say:
“2,500 years ago, Socrates said that the perfect human being is all human beings put together. It is a collective, it is a we. It is all of us together that make perfection.”
Yanni went on to dedicate the performance to Shah Jahan, Mumtaz Mahal, and the artisans who built the Taj Mahal. Yanni: Tribute was the first concert ever held at the Taj Mahal and was later broadcast on PBS, reaching over 250 million viewers worldwide.
It seemed like the perfect note on which to end my thoughts: freedom of intelligence is a concept that carries real weight only when it is globally democratized.
Enjoy the read and have a lovely weekend,
Anita
Cite as: Coleman, Anita S. (2025, May 24). Freedom of intelligence, democratized: the new intellectual freedom. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 3 (28).
Updates
Cultivating Civic Infophilia: The Authors Guild (AG) petition for the reinstatement of the Register of Copyrights, signed by 7,000 people, was delivered to Congress. Additionally, AG reports there have been many petitions and over 40 organizations have issued statements calling for the reinstatement of the Librarian of Congress. They encourage you to continue being in touch with your representatives in Congress about these matters. Source: Authors Guild.
Knowledge Resistance: Do some people resist truth and find lies attractive? remains the most popular essay here on Infophilia. Information avoidance is a part of resisting knowledge. “Avoidant readers” (all ages) and the rise of “news avoidance behaviors” have become a part of educational psychology research, social media, and news agencies as well. An avoidant reader typically refers to someone who tends to avoid engaging deeply with texts or emotional content, often due to discomfort with vulnerability or intimacy. This behavior can stem from an avoidant attachment style where individuals may struggle with emotional closeness and prefer to keep a distance from intense feelings or connections in their reading material. News avoidance became a public fact when Reuters Digital News Report, in 2012, started tracking news consumption in the UK and Europe. The number of people avoiding the news continues to grow. 39% of people worldwide reported actively avoiding the news in 2023, up from 29% in 2017. In response, newsrooms and ‘newsfluencers’ are adjusting to include positive, uplifting content. Source: World Association of News Publishers.
Freedom of Intelligence, Democratized
The New Intellectual Freedom
Older people use ChatGPT sort of like Google; young people use it like a life-advisor; and college students use it like an operating system. — Sam Altman (OpenAI)
It's an open secret. Many people are using generative artificial intelligence (AI) in a number of different ways. Critics may continue to denounce its use for ethical and educational reasons, and futurists will always point out “scary AI futures.” The messy reality that we must deal with is that Pandora's box has been opened. Whether we like it or not, some people’s abilities are augmented and they feel empowered by AI assistants and agents, while others are unwilling ghostworkers, willing infofools, and so much we’ve yet to discover.
Freedom of Intelligence
OpenAI’s proposals frame “freedom of intelligence” by which they mean the freedom to access and benefit from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a foundational principle for U.S. competitiveness, economic growth, and national security in the emerging “Intelligence Age.”
"Freedom of intelligence," representing a nuanced evolution of intellectual freedom is tailored for the Intelligence Age, at whose doorway America stands, according to OpenAI. The company's public comments to the January 2025 request for an AI Action Plan, describes the three key freedoms under freedom of intelligence include:
the freedom to innovate (which means minimal regulations);
the freedom to learn (AI models can train on wide-ranging materials);
and the freedom to access and benefit (global adoption of American AI systems).
This sounds appealing, but the implementation is fraught with challenges. I’ve written about the US copyright lawsuits against the AI companies but will limit myself to a brief look at the search engine startup (2022) that’s challenging Google, namely, Perplexity.ai: Last year, Wired called Perplexity.ai a bullshit machine. Then, there’s the lawsuit against Perplexity.ai, brought by Dow Jones and the New York Post where training data is allegedly being used without compensation and with disregard for copyright holders' rights. Since then, Perplexity has signed revenue-sharing agreements with several publishers, such as TIME, Fortune, and Der Spiegel. Perplexity continued to come under scrutiny for its web scraping practices. Then, it faced backlash for integrating the Chinese company’s DeepSeek AI model. It’s CEO clarified that the data centers used for processing are located in the United States, addressing the concerns about data accessibility and jurisdiction. Perplexity has also submitted a proposal to merge with TikTok's U.S. operations, offering the U.S. government up to a 50% equity stake in the new entity, while allowing the parent Chinese ByteDance to retain some involvement in TikTok's U.S. business. The proposal is currently under consideration, with no final agreement reached as of now. Yet, it’s valuation has continued to rise and recently Perplexity.ai was valued at $14 billion. Human greed knows no boundaries. For the little people that we are, this makes a regulatory approach to AI development — not the loosening of compliances, but the inclusion of wisdom and ethics — critical.
Infrastructure Literacy: The New Information Literacy
What we really need: infrastructure literacy. This is the next evolution of information literacy for the Intelligence Age. It goes beyond traditional media, information or AI literacy, and even infophilic information styles. Infrastructure literacy demands a deeper grasp of the systems, algorithms, and architectures that underpin our digital world. This includes critical awareness of the power dynamics (geo-political and others), biases, addictive design features, privacy and surveillance mechanisms, and economic incentives driving digital and AI technologies.
True freedom in these times demands more than open access or lack of censorship — it requires you to be critically aware of how AI systems work, who controls them, and what values they encode. A reader wrote when he once repeatedly asked ChatGPT why it had lied to him, he became convinced that it had no moral compass to recognize that lying is bad: ‘"Sorry, I'll do better" doesn't cut it. So I'm very worried.’
Competing with Authoritarian AI: The Innovation Question
From another perspective, a software developer asked me: "How can we as open and good developers innovate and compete with bad state actors like China and Russia?" This gets to the heart of why freedom of intelligence matters for national competitiveness, not just idealistic principles.
My reply is centered on four key strategies that actually leverage our democratic advantages: