So, I guess they’re almost here… The Word Police, yes, “word” not “world”. The police that will prevent you to say what’s not politically, religiously, or sexually correct. It’s not your parents who will say “Language!”, it’s the Internet. Actually it’s AI (or actually, censored AI)
Earlier we were having a discussion with my wife, one of the usual ones, light and funny, and we came to mention a slang expression that the Word Police would not authorize me to use, and I started wondering about the origins of such a colourful expression. “Hey, I should ask Bing”, I said. “That should be more efficient than using a search engine”. So here I went to my phone and asked Bing Copilot.
Bing started efficiently to respond, quoting in bold the expression, talking about some possible origins in the 1600s, but I had not finished reading that the response just disappeared and Bing just suggested we changed topics… Man, that felt like “whoops, taboo anyone?”
I reported that to Microsoft, since this reminded me (to a very tiny extent) when the Nazi regime started burning books so that keeping people stupid would prevent them from thinking against the regime…
But to be sure, I asked again Bing Copilot: “how do you translate “fucking moron” to French”. Bing started responding and I had just the time to glance “putain d’abruti” (correct, I’d say…) before, once more, Bing removed the answer and apologized for a hypothetical glitch…
So, yes, Bing is subject to the Word Police.
Oh, and I searched Google right after that, to eventually find the exact answer from my initial question at dictionary.com, which Bing was rephrasing differently. Looks like the Word Police hasn’t affected non-AI websites yet…