On Censorship

At City St George's University this week for a discussion on Truth, Trust and Tricksters in the Age of AI, organized by Index on Censorship, the Institute for Creativity and AI and Global (Dis)Order.

One of the panelists, Kenneth Cukier of the Economist, recounted his attempt to get an AI tool to produce an image to illustrate a point about silo-busting. The tool refused on the grounds that this would be an image of destruction. Cukier regarded this as an example of censorship - the tool was denying his ability to express his ideas freely.

As I suggested in the subsequent discussion, we might also regard this as the tool censoring itself. Self-censorship has been a feature of many authoritarian regimes in the past, and is perhaps emerging in new forms today, especially as people may fear the consequences of their words being taken out of context and blasted around the Internet.

One of the features of agentic AI is presenting the AI device as an autonomous agent. It may appear to be working for Crukier, but it is ultimately controlled by whichever big tech assemblage has developed and disseminated it. Which brings me to a critically important question I have asked several times previously - Whom Does The Chatbot Serve? (Towards Chatbot Ethics, May 2019)

In any case, all communication and creation is necessarily selective. However many images the AI tool does in fact produce, there is a much larger quantity of possible images it has decided or been programmed not to produce. There must be huge amounts of material that the editors of the Economist choose not to publish, for whatever reason, and it would be absurd to frame all these editorial decisions as forms of censorship or self-censorship (although of course some of them may well be).

However, attempts to reduce the quantity and reach of misleading content will often be framed as censorship by those promoting such content, as Jacob Weisberg's latest article demonstrates. There are some difficult issues here, and it is sometimes hard to avoid taking a political side.

 

See also Thinking with the Majority (May 2021), Amplification and Attenuation (October 2021)

Jacob Weisberg, Algorithm Nation (New York Review of Books, 23 October 2025)