Filter Babel: The Challenge of Synthetic Media to Authenticity and Common Ground in AI-Mediated Communication

TL;DR

Filter Babel explores a future where AI mediates private, personalized media experiences, raising questions about communication, shared understanding, and identity in AI-mediated interactions.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of private, AI-mediated communication and discusses its implications for human identity and the integrity of shared understanding.

Findings

Highlights challenges to common ground in AI-mediated private experiences

Discusses potential impacts on human identity and selfhood

Suggests directions for future research in AI communication

Abstract

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.