Speech Act Theory and Ethics of Speech Processing as Distinct Stages: the ethics of collecting, contextualizing and the releasing of (speech) data

Abstract

Using speech act theory from the Philosophy of Language, this paper attempts to develop an ethical framework for the phenomenon of speech processing. We use the concepts of the illocutionary force and the illocutionary content of a speech act to explain the ethics of speech processing. By emphasizing the different stages involved in speech processing, we explore the distinct ethical issues that arise in relation to each stage. Input, processing, and output are the different ethically relevant stages under which a spoken item or a speech navigates within the range of speech-processing modules. Employing the illocutionary force-content distinction, we specify and characterize the inputrelated ethical issues, the output-related ethical issues, and the processing-related ethical issues involved in speech processing. Together with illocutionary force-content distinction, we employ the data-information distinction to characterize the stage-wise ethical issues in the phenomenon of speech processing as the ethics of collecting (speech) data, the ethics of contextualizing (speech) data/information, and the ethics of releasing the contextualized information (processed speech). Immediate ethical issues that arise from the range of speech processing modules are distinguished from distant ethical issues. We also indicate the nature of ethical issues that arise from Speaker Independent speech technologies.

On the criteria of the imitation for the artificial intelligent systems in the moral imitation game

“…It is only in Speech Act theory that the distinction between these two different performances could be analysed. Some studies employ Speech Act theory to look at the ethics concerning speech technologies and to develop the ethical framework for speech processing (Thomas et al, 2023). A crucial point concerning this approach is that this study considers the illocutionary force and illocutionary content distinction of Speech Act theory to develop the ethics of speech processing.…”