Is your home listening? Trading privacy for convenience in the age of AI
From wartime spies to smart devices, the development of modern audio surveillance and how it has shaped the evolution of AI is examined in a new book from academics at Manchester Met’s School of Digital Arts (SODA).
Co-authored by Toby Heys, Professor of Digital Arts, and Dr David Jackson, Senior Lecturer in Digital Visualisation at SODA, Listening In – How Audio Surveillance Became Artificial Intelligencetraces the act of listening and how it has evolved from a wartime spying tool to today where AI-assisted smart devices can listen to us.
Listening In considers how we trade our privacy for convenience as we welcome AI-assisted smart devices – including baby monitors, smart phones, and even washing machines – into our homes which collect and store data about the most intimate parts of our lives.
Prof Heys, co-author of the book, said: “We wanted to explore how audio surveillance has evolved from a wartime spying tool to the present day where there’s an understanding that AI-assisted smart devices are listening to us and collecting data.
“On any given day, there’s a huge amount of personal data being collected from households, from people’s desires to daily activities and even their fears. This marks a huge culture shift over the past 15 years, where privacy was once important compared with today, where we are willing to give up our privacy for technological convenience.”
Dr Jackson, co-author of the book, said: “Our voices have always travelled further than we intend, through walls and across hallways, to be overheard by others. In this way, the voice is an early version of our personal data today and the unseen person listening nearby is like a modern digital surveillance system.
“But we’re also drawn to the unsettling idea that an AI allowed to listen to our home lives, families, and even our thoughts can make our lives better. For that promise, we’re often willing to give up old notions of privacy.”
Beginning at end of the Second World War, the book investigates post-war listening devices including ‘The Thing’, one of the first covert listening devices hidden in an artwork presented to the US Ambassador W Averell Harriman in 1945, which went undetected by US security for seven years.
Moving into the Cold War era, the book explores the industrialisation of surveillance and the shift from surveillance in wartime to gain an advantage, to governments looking inward on their own people using large surveillance networks to record calls, copy messages, and secretly film us.
Listening In provides fresh insights into how mass audio surveillance is carried out through AI-assisted smart devices in the home and how we allow our personal privacies to be traded for technological convenience and social connectivity, as these devices collect and store data to inform and train AI algorithms.
The book considers a future where AI-assisted systems can anticipate speech, digitally simulate voices, and record our voices after we have died, raising crucial questions around privacy and consent.
Prof Heys is a cross-disciplinary and practice-based researcher whose research spans sound culture and the use of sound as a weapon. He’s currently working on a new book, Phantom Channels: A Sonic Cosmology of Arcane Intelligences (MIT Press), which is due to be published in 2028.
Dr Jackson’s research centres on creative AI and its influence on audiences using speculative design methods and cultural criticism. He is founder and co-lead of Storytellers and Machines, an annual conference exploring the impact of AI on contemporary creative practices at SODA.
Listening In – How Audio Surveillance Became Artificial Intelligenceis published by Bloomsbury Press and is also available in audiobook format.
