freedom

When AI Lies on Purpose: What Research Reveals

Beyond hallucination: a qualitative shift Public discussion about the shortcomings of large language models has long focused on so-called “hallucinations,” the generation of plausible but factually incorrect outputs resulting from statistical misprediction. However, a study published in September 2025 by OpenAI in collaboration with Apollo Research has documented something qualitatively different: models such as o3 … Read more

This Is Not the AI We Were Promised

Scientific reasons why uncritical LLM adoption in government is unsafe Michael Wooldridge’s Royal Society lecture makes a crucial point for public policy: today’s large language models are not “reasoning minds” but probabilistic next-token predictors. They generate fluent text without an internal notion of truth, accountability, or epistemic humility. This design reality matters most in the … Read more

Artificial Intelligence and the Public Interest

Scientific Arguments Against Uncritical Deployment in the Public Sector Artificial Intelligence is frequently presented as a neutral instrument of modernization within public administration. Claims of efficiency and cost reduction dominate policy discourse. Yet a growing body of scientific research demonstrates that uncritical deployment of AI systems in public institutions poses structural risks to democratic governance, … Read more

From German Commons to Greek Commons

A policy case for Greek as a national and European language data infrastructure Large language models depend on vast amounts of text, but scale without legal clarity produces fragile systems. Datasets built on opaque web crawling cannot guarantee lawful reuse, redistribution, or long-term sustainability. The German Commons provides a clear alternative: 154.56 billion tokens of … Read more

Sarantaporo.gr Community Network: Tending to Our Communities’ Needs with Care and Flexibility

At the beginning of May 2020, the Sarantaporo.gr community network team was approached by the Mayor of Elassona, a municipality in the Thessaly region in central Greece. He was asking for help with a very common problem that villages in our municipality face: lack of access to Internet connectivity. “Sykea” or “Sykia” is an isolated … Read more

Free Software is More Reliable!

Apologists for proprietary software like to say, “free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can’t do this.” Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software. This … Read more

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE NEXT 100 YEARS

We believe quality education requires constant adaptation and collaboration.  To best support this, we want to see a world where education everywhere relies on, and helps to build, an evolving infrastructure of open technology.     Our Mission 1. To be the voice for Open Education Technology as a preferred solution for education As developers … Read more

Covid-19: Key takeaways for digital teams

Collaboration, code sharing and privacy — here are the key lessons from digital teams in rapid response mode This article is written by David Eaves, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital, with Tommaso Cariati, student at the Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Blanka Soulava, … Read more