Important notes about Small Alterations

Small Alterations exhibits some unanswered questions which could lead to ethical complications if unresolved. The work is perhaps best expressed as an interactive installation piece rather than as openly distributed software. There are concerns in enabling a user to mechanically rewrite news articles; even though the operation occurs entirely on the user’s computer and nothing on the BBC’s servers is altered, there is a foreseeable potential for misuse (for example, an exploited user could be unaware that the software has been installed and the Bias Injector extension could be modified to perform actions without notifying the user). It’s also important to note that these are fundamental implications of the underlying technology rather than of this particular work. Anyone with a minimum of coding experience could easily recreate all the functions for themselves. Additionally, there are critical limitations to the work which I have to acknowledge. The political compass, for example, is simply a two-dimensional illustration of political positions and fails to accurately depict a full range of political beliefs. Large language models do not themselves fully ‘understand’ political philosophies, and even the most advanced versions of the technology are limited in their abilities. AI models lack understanding of events more recent than the dataset they are trained on, and the browser extension itself currently only assesses individual paragraphs in turn rather than the entire article as a whole. These factors mean that the results are lacking in holistic contextual understanding, though in future the software could be developed to mitigate this. Regardless, the role of Small Alterations is only to enable a provocative questioning of trust and reality through a playful exploration of incomplete emerging technologies.