The news that the third iteration of Call of Duty Modern Warfare will use even more actively artificial intelligence to block – “filtering” as marketers would euphemistically say – the “toxicity” of conversations. Translated: thanks to artificial intelligence players’ words will be analyzed in real time and “toxic” expressions, whatever the term means, will be reported to moderators.
The news, however, is not the use of the ubiquitous “AI” to identify “offenders” which is merely a technicality. What should make us think, however, is the further stage of the transition from “mass surveillance” to the privatization of individual control and individualized not only for “national security reasons” but for “trivial” needs to protect turnover, limit reputational risk, reduce the risk of legal action and, even worse, to “educate users”.
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As an old Doom player, it’s quite complicated for me to understand how this is possible, in one shoot-em-up extremely engaging to maintain an Anglo-Saxon demeanor by unloading dozens of shotgun blasts at the minotaur who persists in reacting despite everything, but that’s how it is. So, concretely, in the middle of a raid in which we have set the “Lachmann Sub” (in reality, a replica of the Heckler&Koch MP5) in “full-auto” mode or we are brandishing the “Taq-V” (i.e. an FN -Scar) with the aim of killing someone before he, to paraphrase Piero’s war, “returns the courtesy”, it is not appropriate to shout “fail, damned !&?@#!#%&!” (where instead of special characters the reader can insert any insult he prefers). To avoid being “flagged” by the system for using “toxic language” we will have to stay well below the limit set by the (vague) Call of Duty Code of Conduct and therefore, perhaps, address the opponent with a “kind sir , I will be grateful if you will accelerate your departure from this world by allowing me to tap into your vital points with my instrument for the acceleration of small metal objects equipped with the ability to produce non-repairable continuity solutions in your organic tissues”. It would be like saying that in a five-a-side football match, to ask for the ball from a “selfish” teammate who wants to imitate Pelè’s Escape to victory, one should prefer “please could you spin the ball so as to allow me to develop the attacking action” to a more effective “pass, asshole!!”
This is not the place to go back to the age-old debate relating to the role of some categories of video games in de-latenting (note: “slatentize”, not “deterministically cause”) violent behavior and in their exploitation for recruitment purposes; and we leave to another occasion some reasoning on the role of aggression in social relationships and on the way to defuse it through, for example, sport or other forms of controlled and sublimated management. What matters, here and now, is to highlight how technologically mediated individual control is expanding to the point of invading the most private spheres of the personto arrive even at the moment in which an idea materializes in a sound emission, even before in a writing or behavior.
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You could justify something like that by saying that in the moment in which a person publicly expresses a statement potentially revealing criminal behavior should therefore only be punished or, at least, stopped. If, in fact, thought is action, then manifesting an idea is equivalent to implementing it and therefore there is no need to wait for this to happen to adopt adequate countermeasures.
This is the reasoning that, implicitly, characterizes the EU Digital Service Act, for example and copyright laws. By expanding the preventive control duties of the Very Large Online Platforms on the actions of individuals, in reality the rules delegate to these the candies to decide in a substantially unilateral way what the concrete limit is between freedom of expression and illicit behaviour replacing them with the judicial courts. Worse, then, if this power is exercised on “inappropriate” content and therefore perfectly legal even if unpleasant for some. The power attributed to the VLOPs is to apply a sanction in fact, but not in law, of what is considered (it is not clear by whom, for whom and on what parameters) part of this moralizing category.
It is from the time of the Digest, the collection of legal principles commissioned by Justinian and published in 533That il principle “no one suffers the penalty of thought” (Digest, 49.19.18) it is part of Western culture to the point of representing one of the criteria that article 25 of the Constitution and article 1 of the Criminal Code establish for attributing criminal responsibility. However, what seemed like an insurmountable limit – punishing facts and not thoughts – has long since been largely exceeded and not (only) with new legal rules, but above all thanks to the instrumental and now unstoppable use of an undefined “ethic” which replaces the primacy of the law.
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No one has ever clarified in the name of what the beliefs of an individual or a group of people should become binding for all those who do not think the same way, so much so that it was necessary to “invent” the law precisely as a mediation tool between different readings of reality. However, the attitude of politicians and legislators has changed substantially since then information technologies have allowed the spontaneous and uncontrollable aggregation of groups of individuals, the diffusion of self-produced content and the (more or less) public manifestation of personal ideas and beliefs (in this regard, it is hardly necessary to note that these three areas are those which, in the past, the self-defense needs of the State have always regulated by imposing limits on freedom of assembly, control over the means of producing and disseminating printed matter, and filing of dissidents).
On paper, especially in the community context, veneration for the fundamental rights of the Nice Charter and respect for the primacy of the law continues to be professed. In fact, not only that denunciation is legitimized through i trusted flags del Digital Service Actnot only – by virtue of the same rule – the courts are stripped of their power to exercise exclusive control over freedom of expressionbut European institutions are starting to seriously consider imposing a ban on end-to-end encryption, i.e. the functionality (completely conceptually similar to the one that controls Call of Duty chats) that allows messages and content to be encrypted prima to send them, thus making their interception by institutional and non-institutional criminals much more difficult. In other words, it is always a question of control a person’s behavior in advance and decide unilaterally how to qualify it.
For the record, Apple had tried to apply such a system and then backtracked, and in 2022 Google’s automated preventive analysis systems of the contents conveyed through its services caused the start of a criminal investigation against a parent who had sent the images of his sick son to the pediatrician.
In concrete terms, banning end-to-end encryption means requiring by law to install on Everything is fine fixed or mobile terminal that is a preventive content analysis system and reporting those that the “system” will have classified as illegal or – worse – simply (and here comes the issue) “inappropriate”.
A level of invasiveness of this kind in the individual sphere is simply inconceivable and there’s no need to explain why.
Faced with even this prospect alone, one would have expected at least a heated public debate, but none of this happened; and the silence of the authorities responsible for the protection of personal data is even more deafening, “forget” about the fact that the GDPR is not just about “privacy” but about protecting fundamental rights – all fundamental rights – from treatments that attack them. Stated even more explicitly: intercepting conversations in real time, deciding whether the content is a contractual violation and applying sanctions that may imply the termination of the relationship is a treatment that has nothing to do with “privacy” but is no less harmful to the rights of the person.
We will see, if and when the national data protection authorities realize this, what measures they decide to enact. In the meantime, however, with the boiled frog strategy, what matters is to set a post that delimits a boundary and then start moving it. Therefore, we start by preventing the spread of “inappropriate” content on online platforms already in the publication phase, then we move on to combat “toxic language” in video games and, once the fact becomes socially accepted, the boundary between (really necessary) safety prevention and unacceptable individualized and anticipated control is moving further and further about what you can and cannot say, but – above all – think.
Not even in his worst nightmares George Orwell could have imagined a dystopia of this magnitude but, as the Bard warned, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horace…”
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