Freedom of Intelligence, Democratized

The New Intellectual Freedom

Generated with Flux.1

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:

1. the freedom to innovate (which means minimal regulations);

2. the freedom to learn (AI models can train on wide-ranging materials);

3. 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:

Openness with Guardrails: We maintain open, ethical access to information and AI tools, but with robust safeguards like provenance tracking, copyright respect, and misinformation detection to prevent exploitation by those who steal or poison data.

Collaborative Knowledge Networks: We foster international alliances and public knowledge commons that pool expertise and share best practices — something authoritarian states struggle with due to their secretive nature.

Regulatory Agility: We develop legal and technical frameworks that can quickly adapt to new threats without stifling legitimate innovation. Democracies can actually move faster here when they're not bogged down by centralized bureaucracy.

Cultural and Cognitive Diversity: This is our secret weapon. We encourage innovation ecosystems that draw on a wide range of epistemic cultures, ensuring resilience and creative problem-solving that adversarial states may lack due to centralized control or censorship.

But here's the catch: this only works if we actually commit to infrastructure literacy and broadening our intellectual foundations.

The Social Media Warning

The same reader concerned about ChatGPT’s lying also wrote:

"The primary challenge (as illustrated well by social media's regress which went to the very bottom with X) is that developers despise guardrails and any limits on the exploitation of their inventions. Governments are very reluctant to do what they need to in reining in the worst impulses of AI... Like academic publishing and media, the users are all too willing to use the products and trust the developers not to hurt us. But they do."

This reader's concern directly challenges the competitive strategy above. How can we maintain "openness with guardrails" when developers historically despise guardrails? How can we achieve "regulatory agility" when governments are reluctant to regulate effectively? How is academia complicit? What can you and I do?

This is exactly why infrastructure literacy matters. As with social media, simply trusting developers or relying on user freedom is insufficient when the infrastructure itself is opaque and potentially exploitative. Without deeper understanding and stronger governance, AI will amplify the harms seen in unregulated social media.

Broadening Human Intellectual Foundation

(***Decolonizing Our Minds?)

To avoid the "scary futures" of AI forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo and his AI Futures group, we (and I include myself here, as a product of Western education) must broaden our intellectual foundations. We must move beyond the narrow belief that the West alone has shaped global thought, and begin to engage deeply with the wisdom embedded in non-Western traditions. I've been exploring Chinese and Tamil literatures. Did you know that Chinese literary heritage spans 3,000 years, and Tamil nearly 2,500? I had a vague sense of this, but I hadn’t truly appreciated it until now.

Kokotajlo predicts that by 2027 or 2028, AI systems will surpass human capabilities in coding and research. This rapid advancement could lead to self-improving AI agents, potentially culminating in artificial superintelligence (AGI) by 2028. This underscores the urgency of diversifying our intellectual perspectives to navigate the complexities of the future.

Tamil classical literature, such as Silappadikaram and Manimekalai, embeds social critique and ethical guidance within stories, cultivating a sense of justice and collective responsibility that operates independently of state institutions. In our own times, Cho Ramaswamy’s biting plays and essays transforming Tamil society, exemplify how satire transcends mere humor to become a vehicle for dissent, a catalyst for collective action, a means of preserving cultural memory against erasure. It demonstrates colorfully and vividly that the power of information to reshape societies is not a Western invention but a universal force, rooted in the interplay of creativity, resistance, and ethical responsibility. By learning from non-Western traditions, we can enrich our resistance to the abuse of power and foster a more holistic approach to AI governance that integrates spiritual, ethical, and ecological dimensions. Perhaps then, the AGI we create will reflect not just intelligence, but also leverage the global ethical wisdom for human and machine.

There are a number of international AI projects decolonizing and broadening to include diversity and under-represented cultures for environmental, heritage, and other purposes.

One such in the US is the Authors Alliance project which I’ve mentioned before. With support from the Mellon Foundation, this project is developing a public-interest book training commons for AI. Diversity and alternatives to Western-centric data are goals, though not always explicit, and neither is under-represented literature.

Learning from Warren Buffet

Healthy freedom of intelligence requires not just unfettered access or technological dominance. It requires an awareness of human information styles and adaptive infophilia across cultures, infrastructure literacy, and a strong sense of digital citizenship. These qualities empower individuals and societies to innovate, adapt, and defend against manipulation. They ensure that AI serves all humanity, not just the interests of a privileged few.

The existential risk posed by AI is not simply technological, but cultural and ethical. To ensure AI serves all of humanity — not just a subset — we must overcome the reluctance to question Western supremacy and actively infuse AI with the ethical wisdom and communicative richness of the world's many cultures. Only then can AI truly augment, rather than erode, the full spectrum of human intelligence.

“Capitalism loves growth,” Warren Buffett reminded attendees at the 2025 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. Acknowledging capitalism’s bureaucratic burdens, he emphasized the value of global cooperation. “Trade can be an act of war,” he warned, urging a shift from confrontation to collaboration. “We want to trade with the world,” he said, humorously pointing to America’s historical exports—cotton and tobacco—as examples of focusing on strengths: “We should do what we do best, and they should do what they do best.” In an interconnected world, gloating over others—“I win, you lose”—rarely ends well.

The rise of oligarchy and kleptocracy within democracies reveals the limits of legal systems without a robust civic culture and ethical foundation. Drawing from non-Western traditions that emphasize narrative, communal responsibility, and holistic ethics can strengthen our resistance to the abuse of power. Yet, meaningful progress also requires confronting internalized biases and thoughtfully adapting these lessons to present-day realities instead of resorting or rushing to superficial mimicry.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle is our reluctance to question the supremacy of inherited Western paradigms. Only by fostering infrastructure literacy which enables people and institutions to recognize, critique, and demand accountability from AI can "freedom of intelligence" become a truly democratic, meaningful, just, and secure new form of intellectual freedom for our future together, human and machine.

Notes

***Democratized / Decolonizing our minds: Language matters, and some terms have become loaded or even triggering for certain audiences. That’s why I want to avoid jargon and use clear, accessible language whenever possible. Personally, democratizing and broadening intellectual foundations resonates more with me than decolonizing as it feels both more inclusive and constructive in framing the conversation. In fact, the very first conference panel I co-led nearly 30 years ago was on “intellectual diversity”!

Historically, the US and the West have invoked freedom (liberal) to fight against the authoritarian East - sorry this is simplistic, please don’t misunderstand! Freedom of intelligence isn’t well-used but by the time the 2025 AI Action plan is delivered to the President in July, it might well be. The state-centric and sometimes hegemonic nature of this framing is consistent with the way U.S. strategic interests (including economic) are articulated in the context of intelligence, national, and global security. Here’s OpenAI’s intro to it in their public comments (emphasis mine).

As our CEO Sam Altman has written, we are at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity: the Intelligence Age. But we must ensure that people have freedom of intelligence, by which we mean the freedom to access and benefit from AGI, protected from both autocratic powers that would take people’s freedoms away, and layers of laws and bureaucracy that would prevent our realizing them.

More than 400 million people around the world are using ChatGPT to ideate, discover, and break through beyond what we’re currently capable of doing on our own. Just two weeks ago, we partnered with the Department of Energy’s national labs to bring together 1,500 scientists to use our tools to take scientific discovery farther, faster… Source: OpenAI’s proposals for the US AI Action Plan (March 2025). https://openai.com/global-affairs/openai-proposals-for-the-us-ai-action-plan/

For me, “freedom of intelligence” democratized → intellectual freedom. The educator philosopher John Dewey who coined related terms: “freeing the life-processes” and “organized intelligence” argued that education expands our capacity to imagine, deliberate, and choose, thereby deepening our freedom. I’m building on that too.

Here’s a link to the Authors Guild recent newsletter.

World Association of News Publishers. https://wan-ifra.org/2025/04/how-newsrooms-are-countering-news-avoidance-by-offering-uplifting-content-to-break-negative-news-cycles/

Global Investigative Journalism Network. https://gijn.org/stories/5-free-open-source-digital-tools-combat-disinformation/

Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine, delivering conversational, citation-backed answers instead of traditional lists of links. Launched in December 2022, it has quickly gained traction, attracting millions of users and raising over $100 million in funding from investors like Nvidia and Dell. Unlike Google, which relies heavily on SEO and advertising revenue, Perplexity offers a cleaner, ad-free experience. About the Copyright lawsuit. Dec. 2024. Perplexity.ai. https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/about-the-dow-jones-lawsuit | Perplexity is a bullshit machine. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/ | Amazon is investigating Perplexity over claims of web scraping. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/aws-perplexity-bot-scraping-investigation | DeepSeek's R1 was 'genuinely a gift to the world's AI industry,' says Jensen Huang. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-jensen-huang-praises-deepseek-gift-world-ai-industry-inference-2025-5 | Perplexity AI’s bid for TikTok. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-trump-perplexity-87988733973760927bb5681f7de9b9af | AI startup Perplexity nears funding at $14 billion. (May 12, 2025). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-12/ai-search-startup-perplexity-nears-funding-at-14-billion-value

Ghost work. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_work

Forget the future, AI is causing harm now. Scientific American. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw3900

Authors Alliance. Developing a public interest training commons of books. https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/12/05/developing-a-public-interest-training-commons-of-books/

Fairly Trained. https://www.fairlytrained.org/

The Movement to Decolonize AI: Centering Dignity Over Dependency (Global South) https://hai.stanford.edu/news/movement-decolonize-ai-centering-dignity-over-dependency

Is artificial intelligence about to take your job? According to Daniel Kokotajlo, the executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, that should be the least of your worries. Kokotajlo was once a researcher for OpenAI, but left after losing confidence in the company’s commitment to A.I. safety. This week, he joins Ross to talk about “AI 2027,” a series of predictions and warnings about the risks A.I. poses to humanity in the coming years, from radically transforming the economy to developing armies of robots. Source: An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse. Interesting times with Ross Douthat. May 15, 2025.

Source: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-interview-with-the-herald-of-the-apocalypse/id1438024613?i=1000708565812

AI Futures Group. https://ai-futures.org/ | Daniel Kokotajlo (lead)

Warren Buffet. May 3, 2025. Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Annual Meeting. Investor Center. (25 mins) www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhtQg78LSUk | CNBC (6 hours) www.youtube.com/live/1LWBphTImy4?si=YlXNc8iUq4G9z9cT | Buffet was talking about growth in the context of the US debt ceiling. He also used the metaphor of capitalism as a “cathedral attached to a casino” to describe its strengths.

Tamil literature. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Tamil-literature

Yanni. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanni | Yanni’s Tribute to the Taj Mahal (text + single video) Home & Abroad. https://despardes.com/yanni-tribute-to-taj-mahal-videos/ | Tribute concert. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibuNS5hS1js

Related