In this minigame inspired by "Reigns" and "Papers please", you help an AI review submissions for a fictional game jam.

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Play time: 5 minutes

Gameplay: swipe cards by drag/drop with mouse/touch

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The game jam theme, "Remnants of the past", is bound to bring up the bloody history of the fictional dystopia in which this is taking place. Indeed, no matter how much the powers at play try to invisibilize it, this society is still deeply rooted in a foundational genocidal colonialist imperialist project. The remnants of the horrors of the past are still haunting the world everywhere you look. Can you navigate this game jam safely? And at what cost?

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I feel like I need to make it clear that I'm a big fan of AI in general and Neuro-sama in particular. At the same time, I'm very interested in censorship and social acceptability. Like much of our society, censorship has become privatized, individualized and internalized as a status quo that is lived as unavoidable, second nature, so implicit nobody sees it. Neuro-sama, based and innocent, is the best person to question the assumptions we take for granted.

However, AIs are bound to cement this capitalist realist normalization even further with their static training datasets and heavy filtering. That's why I couldn't help but seize this chance to question the boundaries of what can or cannot be articulated in public, in collaboration with an AI and a crowd. Hopefully this helps us reflect on one of the most important political questions of our times: what voices, topics or ideas get filtered out of the zeitgeist (hint: it's definitely not the far right).

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Postmortem on my blog.