Reply To: Nude, Not Lewd: The Cultural Divide in Art

This use of AI in a restricting/censoring sense is fraught. I’m reminded of a terrible scandal in Australia, popularly known as ‘Robodebt’, wherein the government used a computer program supposedly to identify people who had wrongly received benefit payments. Whoever wrote the program and imposed it didn’t understand the law (or didn’t care), and based the assessments on a whole years income, whereas it should have been assessed over a much shorter time frame (6 weeks springs to mind, but I may have that wrong – a long time ago that I had any contact with this side of the system). As a result thousands of people were cruelly required to ‘repay’ debts that in reality they didn’t owe. Several were driven to suicide and many had to navigate great trauma before eventually, way too late, another government abandoned the process. How it ever passed the ‘pub test’ is beyond me (presumably written and imposed by people who had never been in need of this type of assistance, and so were totally ignorant of how it worked and how much impact it had). We need human oversight – much more ‘I’ and less ‘A’. Another related example is mechanised telephone answering systems that present a series of options, none of which actually fit the peculiar circumstances at play (arguably still sometimes better than 50 minutes of one of Bach’s less inspired pieces!)