The Unsung Victims of AI

I’ve written extensively about AI and ASR, and in particular how ASR could cause further delays in court record production. I’m sure entering the terms AI or ASR into the search box at Stenonymous.com will reveal plenty of the opinions and facts I’ve recorded over the years.

Truth be told, though, with clean enough audio, it’s also my firm belief that ASR can work the other way, producing a usable first draft of a court transcript. Sorry, but, from what I’ve seen, this is likely true. The catch is that, short of having a professional tech onboard to make sure the audio is coming in clean, you often won’t have the cleanest audio in depositions and courtrooms even under the best circumstances with fully willing participants.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the prevalent form of AI today, the LLM or generative chatbot or whatever you want to call it. When I was a kid, the closest thing we had to it was SmarterChild. Now there’s ChatGPT, Grok, etc.

And they have no problem killing people, because in America’s rush to see what this technology can do, we didn’t bother to put effective guardrails on the damn things.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that there are great use cases for these glorified chatbots. They can give pretty accurate information. Like when I asked Grok what Stenonymous.com is.

But again, I’d like to take the time to mention that there will be casualties. These chatbots, for better or worse, tend to validate the feelings of the user. For the mentally ill, they can validate and enhance delusions. For the young, as we’ve seen, they can encourage suicide.

I am but one voice. But I say legislate. We need legislative guardrails on this technology. We need legislators to stop looking away from what they don’t understand and start understanding that the world is different now and the needs of society are great. Technology must be kept up with by lawmakers.

But I have very little hope. I’ve seen the executive branch fail at fighting the most obvious and documented corporate fraud, right up until the executive branch became enslaved to wealthy interests through The New Emperor. The Supreme Court is enslaved to wealthy interests through open bribery. The Congress is enslaved to wealthy interests through the Citizens United ruling. We have very serious problems in America.

At the end of the day, I can only hope that you’re doing as well as me, reader. Or better. I’ll continue to use my voice.

But for now a moment of silence for all the unsung victims of AI.