iOrwell: Speech-Policing AI Wins MIT Prize, but Watch for Abuse

As technology advances, count on those in power to abuse it to clamp down on dissent. An artificial intelligence breakthrough at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers reason for vigilance to protect our liberty in the years ahead.Inclusive.ly won second place at the university’s Entrepreneurship Competition for AI that can “detect words and phrases that contain bias and can measure the level of bias or inclusivity in communication.”The algorithm promises clinical precision, ensuring nobody has to speak up, argue, or risk offense; silicon brains will keep us all safe from uncomfortable ideas. We forget that AI is programmed by human beings with biases.Not to mention that AI going rogue is the basis of hundreds of dystopian stories from “Maximum Overdrive,” where trucks become self-aware, to “The Terminator.”Inclusive.ly’s says its goal is “helping people and organizations create a more inclusive environment,” good intentions that are only a few keystrokes away from being perverted into Orwell’s “Newspeak.”In his dystopian novel “1984,” people, not computers, police language and ensure “goodthink” falls in line with the state’s ideology, rendering dissent impossible by eliminating the language necessary for criticism.The MBA candidates who co-founded Inclusive.ly don’t seem to have given any thought to how their technology could be abused, which is a common blind spot of good, smart people, such as Alfred Nobel.Nobel named his new invention, dynamite, after “dynamis,” the Greek word for “power.” A pacifist, he hoped that power would be used to end war, and instead saw it employed to blow people to pieces.One of Inclusive.ly’s co-founders said, “We’re here to create a world where everyone feels invited to the conversation.” Sounds like a noble — or Nobel — goal, but aren’t college campuses supposed to be that world?I’m old enough to remember when one attended university to be exposed to new ideas, to meet people from diverse backgrounds, to ask or be asked ignorant questions, to expose the bigot and uplift the marginalized, all without the aid of AI.Requiring everyone to operate within strict intellectual parameters is the definition of discrimination and exclusion. As General George S. Patton said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”A free society relies on people with different opinions speaking their minds, but technology can put a stop to that. We know because even without AI, college campuses are hostile to conservative thought, pro-Israel speakers, even comedians.This is what Newspeak categorized as “wrong-think,” and far from making everyone feel included, it results in a fear to even form contrary thoughts, much less express them, on pain of retribution.Inclusive.ly isn’t yet that sort of tool. It only makes “suggestions for improvement,” but think of Communist China’s social media scores. Such a regime won’t apply this AI in a benevolent way to ensure fairness.The regime already has a sophisticated network to police speech and its “Great Firewall of China,” a cute Western name for the insidious regime’s control of information. Forget ever referring to Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square massacre if the leaders apply this innovation.The MIT students also say Inclusive.ly’s AI “can detect discrimination, microaggression, and condescension,” terms with so much gray area that the algorithms will have to reflect the bias of the programmers.The neologism “microaggression” is an example of wrong-think so ephemeral it can cover anything. Several moments from American presidential debates come to mind. Vice President Gore sighing in 2000. President Biden telling President Trump to shut up.Would Inclusive.ly flag President Reagan’s 1984 quip about his opponent Walter Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” as discrimination or age bias? How about referring to Istanbul, not Constantinople; Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; or Imperial Japan’s “comfort women”?Is the preceding paragraph too condescending for the algorithm? If so, it would suggest a rewrite — a digital version of the political officers that rode herd in the Soviet Union.The achievement of Inclusive.ly is impressive and the students have a right to be proud. Yet as a free society, we should be wary of technology that promises to think for us, because to quote the fictional spy Sterling Archer, “That’s exactly how ‘Maximum Overdrive’ starts.”

iOrwell: Speech-Policing AI Wins MIT Prize, but Watch for Abuse

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