A friend of mine recently left me a voicemail that had profanity in it. This wasn’t an angry voicemail, but a playful one. However, Apple’s voicemail transcription decided to replace the profanity with asterisks. To understand the message, I had to play it back. If I couldn’t do that I would have been unable to access the true message’s meaning.
A similar thing happens on social media with transcription. The people in the video will say one thing, but the text you read on the screen will omit it or say something else. Or worse, they go the extra step of editing the audio as well, replacing or omitting the word they don’t agree with. And this isn’t just for profanity. Words like “Covid” and “Tiananmen Square” have a way of getting censored too.
This is AI-powered censorship, plain and simple. AI (and by extension the companies that leverage the models) is deciding what is and is not allowed to be expressed. Instead of faithfully transcribing what a person authentically said, it gets sanitized. In some instances, this sanitization may be warranted or welcome by the creator. But in so many others I’ve experienced, it totally changes the meaning of what someone is trying to communicate.
Given the nature of product development and technology, it’s not far-fetched to see this censorship as an attack on expression and free speech. Something that will only get worse over time. In the future, AI will take videos of people expressing thoughts or feelings and rewrite what they said. It’ll put words in their mouth, change upset faces to neutral ones, all to match how companies want people expressing themselves on their platforms. Truth itself will be controlled. There will be no ability to share reality, only the reality that companies decide to permit.
The tools for this already exist. It’s only a matter of time before companies incorporate this more deeply into their platforms. Users will adopt it because they either lack the control to say otherwise, or because it piggybacks on some other feature they actually want.
While I still have the opportunity to say it: fuck this shit.
