My biggest fear is that people use the knowledge function of AI, because if power can get its hands on the ability to tell everybody what is true, that's the nightmare outcome.
Today's Prof G deep dive is on free speech in America. We're joined by Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of FIRE, which stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. We speak about the government's pressure on the media, whether AI bots have free speech rights, and what's going on on college campuses. Plus, what does it mean to support free speech when you find the speech itself offensive? We've interviewed Greg before. Incredibly pragmatic, very insightful, a real blue flame thinker. Always enjoy our conversations, and I'm sure you'll enjoy this one.
Greg, where does this podcast find you?
I moved up to the suburbs of New York City because that's where I was spending all my time anyway for media and fundraising. But brought my whole family up.
Oh, nice. So, when we last spoke with you in July of 2025, we discussed free speech in America, the rise of cancel culture, campus protests, and more. Since then, we've seen the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a government that's increasingly tried to silence dissent, and the proliferation of AI tools that force us to question whether, you know, to try and discern what speech is even real. What, in your view, is the most important topic or incident as it relates to free speech today?
It's the ongoing campaign of Trump versus the media. We're seeing that really demonstrated dramatically by the exclusion of Politico and CNN and MSNBC from the White House press pool. That by itself is not as dramatic as his utter campaign against it. But the thing that I think we're going to be thinking about, you know, 20 years from now is whether or not we got AI regulation right or wrong. Because in terms of that being a boon for freedom of expression and for inquiry, it absolutely could be. It could also be a disaster.
Give us the fulcrum between those two. Give us examples of how it could. It's like the godfather of AI, Hinton, is saying we could have good AI, we could have bad AI. Outline a future where it's bad for free speech and good for free speech.
I've been trying to outline this on my Substack to try to explain what my biggest fear is for AI. And I'm going to agree a little bit with Michel Foucault, even though I think he was dead wrong on the fact that power decides what truth is. I think that got completely short-circuited by the scientific method in the Enlightenment. But I do think that power wants to control truth. And it doesn't necessarily think that's a bad thing, that essentially, you know, this is the idea of having a ministry of truth, having misinformation be your primary guiding light. And my biggest fear is that people use the eventual regulation of AI at some level, which is going to happen, as an excuse to go into, you know, what we call on Substack the librarian function, the knowledge function of AI. Because if power can get its hands on the ability to tell everybody what is true, that is, you know, the kind of power that totalitarians would have dreamt of. So that's the nightmare outcome. The positive outcome is we use it as a way, as a distributed small-l liberal system for better understanding what the world actually looks like in a great sort of disconfirmation, Karl Popper kind of way of trying to see what is true by figuring out what isn't.
I'll start with the question I'm leading up to. Do bots have free speech rights? Because I think we're going to look back on this era and I worry that we're going to have erred on the side of free speech. First off, I find that anyone who lectures about free speech other than you is full of it and is the first to suppress people.
People are unfortunately. They don't make us look very good.
Yeah. Whether it's Vance telling Europeans to embrace free speech as they kick CNN or whoever out of the White House.
Yeah. I believe platforms should be deleting, moderating when they see a bot influencing the dialogue, and that free speech isn't real. It's sometimes, and I might be being paranoid here, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. Sometimes I think two-thirds of my comments are bots.
That are serving a different alternative objective that we're not even cognizant of. Do bots have free speech rights? They don't. But the people who created them generally do. But at the same time, given we're talking about private companies, why do companies actually tolerate bots to the degree that they do? I think it's partially because they help juice their traffic numbers and make it look like there are more people out there. What you have to do in that case is kind of change the incentive structure to disincentivize the benefits of bots.
I find that in the instance of corporations that use free speech as a shield for reckless spread of conspiracy theory, sometimes from bots and agents that don't represent free speech or don't represent the actual views of sentient beings, and I struggle with that balance. I want to talk about you joined Jake Tapper on CNN to discuss one of the most noteworthy free speech incidents recently, and that is Macklemore and Ed Sheeran.
Oh my god, I hate the fact that I have to keep talking about them. But yeah, go on.
You, I called him an anti-Semite, which was probably, I don't know, maybe it was fair, maybe it wasn't. And that's all anyone's commenting now. No one's listening to anything I'm doing. Everyone's just commenting on Macklemore.
But anyways, so I apologize in advance, but you were on CNN with Jake talking about this. Why do you think this specific incident has captured so much attention? What are your views on it? Because I think our views might be different on this one, especially as it relates to Robert Kraft deciding that he should not play at the stadium.
Well, you know, I've departed a little bit from my normal memo on this to just say that I am concerned about the anti-Israeli sentiment. I'm not Jewish, but I am concerned about the anti-Israeli sentiment that has kind of taken over, spread from campuses where I think it's reached a concerning point. So I definitely have, you know, I admit to some bias on this, but when it comes to my First Amendment and free speech analysis, I basically think three things. One, the First Amendment is on Robert Kraft's side. To be able to say that you can't use my private venue in order to perform because I don't like your message is within his right to do. However, the analysis should never end there. Just in the same way that we wouldn't cheer when a bookseller decides that I'm not going to sell any copies of Ulysses. They have the right to do that, but that's not great. People don't really think that's good. But the third one's the one that I think a lot of the people who are on Kraft and the other venue owners' sides are missing is attempts to squelch these points of view tend to make them more intense. And particularly if part of the narrative is that pro-Israel people have too much societal influence, then deciding this artist can't perform at my venue, it doesn't send a great message. It plays into conspiracy theories. And even though I'm sympathetic to Robert Kraft's opinion on this, I'm not a, you know, again, I'm departing from what I'm supposed to do, but I'm not a fan of Macklemore's opinions on this, but nonetheless, I don't like it. And I think Americans get concerned when artists are denied venues because of their political point of view.
It's so interesting. I really like your take on this. I agree with you. I see it as a private venue, and if I don't want someone in my house for whatever reason, I can say no, you're not invited, and I don't want you here.
But as your friend, if you decided to disinvite someone who was like a genius and who you'd already been friends with, but you just don't like his one political view, I'd probably be as your friend be like, 'Oh, come on. Have him over and talk.' You know, and that's what free speech culture is. The argument of free speech culture is essentially free speech is useful, but it's super useful if people actually talk to each other and actually hear each other out and do all these things that actually make free speech more useful. You're not required to observe it, and nor should you be. But at the same time, I think in a healthier free speech culture than America's had, people would have said something more like, 'Well, I'm not buying tickets to him.' You know, just don't go.
And to be fair, if Robert Kraft had called me, which he did not, I would have said, 'You realize you're going to juice his downloads.'
Granted, if it's not Tom Petty, I'm not listening to it. Maybe Fleetwood Mac.
That was my second concert.
There you go. Well, you're a man of great taste in music. He's just brought more attention to him. And you're right, it's probably not serving the purpose of fighting anti-Semitism. The thing I did not like about it, I'm curious to get your take here, is that people were conflating it with what's going on in the White House, banning media firms, and I saw the two as entirely distinct.
Oh, yeah. No, these are not even on the same plane.
In terms of AI, are my free speech or your free speech rights being violated when people strip mine your content and then resell it back to people? Does that have any overlap, or can we take any cues on what to do there from theories around free speech?
It's interesting because it's at the intersection of something that was very important for the success of, forget the expression, the West, which is intellectual property. And intellectual property is a, like I'm really starting to appreciate even at an even deeper level how important the patent system was for a lot of the progress and prosperity we take for granted today. Now, I also did intellectual property law for the one year I wasn't working at FIRE after law school, and I was troubled by it in a lot of ways. And when it comes to trademark and copyright, you know, there's a major tension there where essentially, and we're talking about copyrighted works, that essentially you want knowledge to be free. You don't want it to be unreasonably withheld. So we have, you know, copyrights expire, for example, things go into public domain. The best argument for the AI companies is that essentially they, you know, they have the same access to open information as everybody else does, and that they can use that. The best argument against it, of course, is that you are in some cases, you know, stealing information from copyrighted sources at a scale that simply wasn't practical before. But the funny thing for me is I know, for example, 'Coddling the American Mind', we got the notices of being, you know, part of to train models, and they asked me if I wanted to like participate in one of those class action lawsuits, and my response was like, well, no, I'm actually kind of excited. I'm actually pleased that they're using my contribution in order to inform what it thinks.
One-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death. Any thoughts on where Americans stand on speech and what his murder kind of revealed about it?
You know, I had a lot of criticisms of Charlie Kirk also for not being great on freedom of speech, particularly of scholars he disagreed with. I think he was really bad on that. I did, however, after he was murdered, you know, go and watch some of the ways he actually debated with some of these kids and came away much more impressed with it, for lack of a better word, than I expected. He was more patient and in some cases nicer than I expected him to be. And none of this matters for what happened. The guy was murdered, and as best we can tell, the guy was murdered for trying to argue with people, you know, that he disagreed with, but usually in a pretty civil way. And I watched the way this is handled sometimes on the left. They've turned him into a caricature of who he was by the time he died. A lot of the stuff that people really object to what he said, I always try to take seriously the possibility I'm wrong. So like after he was murdered, I tried to actually, you know, re-evaluate him. And some of the stuff that I didn't notice is that some of his more, that I would consider, you know, again, my own political opinion, obnoxious statements were before he actually started debating with students. And I thought when you see people, you know, celebrating his murder or refusing to talk about it, and that's something we found, by the way, in the FIRE research, is as far as topics that students find very uncomfortable to talk about, Charlie Kirk is the new one that's been added to Israel-Palestine as things that students don't want to talk about.
