Since you use Scrabble tiles as an example, it’s worth noting that slurs are constantly being removed from the official Scrabble dictionary. So while your Scrabble tiles can technically form slurs when used outside of the official context of Scrabble, they are illegal moves when used within the official context of Scrabble. Similarly, I could cut out letters from the Washington Post and spell out a slur, but the Washington Post is not liable for that racial slur.

The context of Metaphor a Minute is the creation of metaphors in the English language. So for example, if there’s an English word that’s a slur in some other language, I’m not concerned with that, because anyone can see that the domain of the bot is the English language (more subtly, it’s U.S. English). Because the context is “English language metaphors,” and you can construct metaphors using slurs in English, I need to alter that usage somehow. If you read the section of Alien Phenomenology where Ian discusses his decision to censor his image-picker, I think it would become clearer. I don’t want to sit there and explain to someone that, no, the slur was totally random so it’s really okay! It would be one thing if the metaphors were only viewable by, say, people who build bots and do philosophy and understand what I’m doing — but this is a performance that takes place in public, and I have to answer to the public. It’s partly a covering-my-ass move, for sure.

When you say, “I understand the need to censor a bot if it is being paired with a message and those two are incongruent,” I get what you’re saying, but the problem is I have no way to programmatically evaluate whether there’s an incongruency. For example, the bot could say “______ is a slur: unacceptable and malicious” and the use of the word would be perhaps questionable but in my opinion totally fine. But I can’t check for scenarios like that without, say, using a human to moderate each tweet. So instead, I censor the bot.

I understand the need to censor a bot if it is being paired with a message and those two are incongruent. But what is Metaphor a Minute’s message that a slur would interfere with?