And can robots be censored for hate-speech or other "wrong-speech" written by Artificial Intelligence content creation software? What legal liability will news outlets have, once robots write their columns?
Contentbot service providers ("chatbots") offer prices affordable for students wanting to buy AI-produced essays (the concept of plagiarism is mere nostalgia). This service is also affordable for freelancers who submit a lot of material to magazines. If even only a few online mags per month publish their submissions, they could soon cover the cost of contentbots and start profiting.
Is this seriously where the "knowledge economy" is going (the economy comprising journalism, the arts, entertainment, law, tech, finance, consulting, education, and research)? Then you'll need only feed into your contentbot provider the terms which hip magazine editors use in their Submission Guidelines (terms like "inclusive, indigenous, racialized, marginalized, ablist, trans-supportive, fat-supportive, anti-colonialist" and so on).
Journalists and news reporters thought the rising tide of unemployment was already bad, but newspapers and magazines won't need journalists at all once owner-
editors feed requirements straight to their robot staff, based on polls showing what readers want and what the identity-biases of the moment are.
So never mind cancel culture -- we've got pre-cancel culture. But what happens when a magazine is sued for defamation or for discriminating against someone? Can you sue a robot? (Soon we'll be asking, can a robot sue me?)
And who would defend the news outlet or magazine in court? Will lawyers and judges too be robots that automatically search precedents which lead to the only logically-artificially-intelligent decision?
What if a radio host wants to interview the "source" of a controversial article -- and the source is a robot? (Can robots use four-letter words on the radio, or will another robot bleep them out automatically?)
Clergy are already debating among themselves the morality of using AI-generated sermons (though some people say the fundamentalists already do ...)
Some call these trends "DeepAI". Others call them Final Shallowing -- of the life of the mind.
Best response? Maybe thinkers still able to articulate their own thoughts should have a soapbox in every town square where they can be heard by a public who can see that they're made of actual flesh and blood. But wait ... that's been done! The ancient Greeks called the town square the agora, and the Romans the "porch" (stoa), where the Stoic philosophers spoke to the passing crowd. And in Enlightenment Europe the cafes and salons filled the same role, and people knew how to be good conversationalists.
So best response? Get offline, and communicate in the flesh -- especially in classrooms.
