Filter Babel: The Challenge of Synthetic Media to Authenticity and Common Ground in AI-Mediated Communication
It raises conceptual challenges for researchers in AI-mediated communication and human-computer interaction, but is entirely speculative without empirical results.
This paper explores the hypothetical 'Filter Babel' scenario where all media is privately generated, potentially undermining common ground and communication integrity, while also considering the role of private experience in identity formation.
Filter Babel is a thought experiment about a near future in which everything we read, watch, and even whom we "meet" is privately generated for each of us. If we each recede into a world of purely private experience, we may each develop a Wittgensteinian private language that remains intelligible to others only because an AI translator sits in the middle. This intermediation challenges the integrity of common ground and therefore of communication. On the other hand, private experience is an essential engine of identity and selfhood: as Lanier warns, one must be somebody before one can share oneself. This paper opens a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that Filter Babel might present to human communication and identity, and what constructive directions for research in AI-mediated communication might ensue.