Serious concerns remain over potential for censorship, lack of openness and ethics with Deep-time Digital Earth’s GeoGPT. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) is promoted to the international community by Zhejiang Lab and DDE, in the name of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS).
Article published in the ‘Geoscientist’ in response to ‘GeoGPT: An Update’ by Ludden and colleagues from Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) and Zhejiang Lab. Quoting from the article:
“The creation of a separate international-facing version of the GeoGPT application on servers in Singapore is a positive step. However, the Terms and Conditions for its use still contain clauses prohibiting geoscientists from asking questions that may “tarnish the image of the [Chinese] state” (GeoGPT, 2025). Such a clause seems out of place for AI hosted outside the legal jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and has the potential for censorship and the erosion of freedom of speech, particularly for the international community researching social geoscience topics.”
“GeoGPT is promoted as ‘open science’ and ‘open source’ and, following calls from geological societies worldwide, DDE committed to openly releasing their training data (Hawkins, 2024). Yet, it now appears that DDE will disclose only the training sources (publisher and journal list) rather than the actual training data (GeoGPT, 2025). It seems that none of the user-facing software code, the underlying knowledge graph (GeoKG), the databases used for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), nor the 100,000 geological question-answer pairs used for LLM training are openly available (GeoGPT, 2025). Without transparency at the individual article level, users cannot assess what geoscientific biases may exist. Ultimately, GeoGPT is not reproducible. Without this cornerstone of scientific integrity, GeoGPT should not be marketed as open science or open source.”
“As is common for online-hosted AI tools, GeoGPT appears to have Terms and Conditions that give the proprietor legal rights to use data uploaded by users for the proprietor’s own purposes. I question the ethics of offering free AI capabilities, particularly to geoscientists in the Global South, in exchange for rights to their data, promoted by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS)-endorsed DDE.”
Link for the full article with references, published in the Geoscientist, and the article to which it responded.
https://geoscientist.online/sections/viewpoint/letters/geogpt-concerns-remain/
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