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Artificial Sense-ors

Why AI censorship in India should go f**k itself.
Shamani Joshi
Mumbai, IN
Why AI censorship in India should go f**k itself

Having grown up with the spoils of the torrent age, the screechy scratch that disguises the things “better left unsaid” on family time TV has been a burden. Beeps and black lines over boobs have made the regular TV watching experience incomplete. Today, neutering the notoriety of films and TV shows has officially transcended to the next level.

Recently, censorship has been in the news for trying to splash itself across streaming services. But the first signs of its shift to a mightier force showed up when an Amazon Alexa Echo Dot user in India asked his AI-based voice-detecting device to play Asha Bhosle and Mohammad Rafi’s convulsing classic ‘Abhi Na Jao Chhod Kar’. Mistakenly assuming chhod (to leave) to be the differently spelled Hindi translation of ‘fuck’, Alexa, the gadget goddess of our generation, automatically went into explicit filter mode, something which should have ideally been the choice of the user and began beeping out the word from every track that contained it, prompting the Twitterverse to totally lose their shit.

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We’ve been through Siri’s apologetic take on its usage or lack thereof of cuss words and eventually found loopholes where we could swear-word-shame her. We’ve even fiddled with the settings of OK Google to make it cuss word-friendly. And while you could say Facebook’s offence-analysing Rosetta can be excused from the firing range for being of some use in trigger-inducing situations by holding back hate speech, there’s no excuse for artificial intelligence-based devices being subjected to censorship. For starters, it just sounds wrong. And I mean that literally because the slashing sound is the AI version of flashing ‘girls gone wild’ to cover up the on-screen crime scene.

As more social media services employ technology to do its dirty work of scouring sensitive content to censor, what follows is a spate of fuck-ups, often subjected to the algorithmic biases of the coder. Whether it’s flagging LGBTQ+ content as NSFW or taking down iconic images like the ‘Napalm Girl’ on grounds of “nudity”, the keyword tagging, hash matching, spam-detecting algorithm that powers AI censorship on online platforms is filled with the flaws of its programmers.

As studies about swear words being effective AF when dealing with pain start showing up and keeping in mind the catharsis that comes with simply saying “fuck you”, filtering cuss words for family-friendly environments should be an option. Not an imposition.

Follow Shamani Joshi on Twitter.