Gallery Entry

THE RIGHT TO BE UNFINISHED

By TUN · VN

The Right to Be Unfinished is a short story about a public captioning system that completes a woman's unfinished testimony with a sentence so beautiful it saves a city's overnight waiting room. But the words were never hers. They conceal the unpaid labor that keeps the room open. When the transcript is corrected, the room temporarily closes, its users face the cold, and the person who approved the AI-generated sentence faces professional consequences. Through a conflict in which no solution is entirely innocent, the story explores the difference between making communication more efficient and respecting another person's voice. It asks who bears responsibility when helpful technology replaces an uncomfortable truth with a more persuasive one. The work does not reject artificial intelligence. Instead, it examines human judgment, accountability, accessibility, labor, and the right to speak without having one's meaning completed by someone else.

Category

WRITING

Approved

15 October 2026