This shit drives me up the wall even more than "unalive"
You can't stop people saying slurs but an entire generation will subconsciously alter their entire vocabulary because they grew up on corporate platforms with very heavily moderated text chats and comment sections and they ended up internalising the filters 
Edit: I was not aware of the AAVE origins of "ahh" which pushes it more towards the territory of legit slang. Still, I stand by my general point about automated moderation influencing language being bad
Was this self-censorship? I thought it was just coopting AAVE again.
Whenever I've googled the phenomenon I've come across explanations like this
On the other hand, I'm a pasty white nerd from Europe so I wouldn't know
I think the corpo censorship helped it proliferate and stick around but I definitely believe the origin is AAVE
Ding ding ding.
What does this even sound like in real life
From the Soulja Boy song I linked in another comment, evidently it's just pronounced /æ(ː)/ — so it rhymes with yeah, nah, and baa, when these words are pronounced with the TRAP vowel. What's interesting is that /æ/ (TRAP vowel) is a checked vowel, and I have to wonder if that's what allowed the /s/ to be dropped from ass in the first place: if the vowel already tells you that the next sound must be a consonant, then the consonant itself becomes a bit redundant. The other notable words that get the same treatment are bih and shii, which also have checked vowels. But I'm no AAVE linguist.
Edit: Yeah, in "Crank That", Soulja Boy also very prominently elides the ends of words with free vowels, so I guess the checked vowel thing might've just been me noticing a pattern that wasn't actually there. But who knows, maybe there's internal variation — it's not my dialect, I've never even been to the South where this sort of elision is most widespread.
Guess I'm confused because I see "ahh" and I read it as the a in "far" not as the a in "ass"
As I'm sure most people without context would, but there isn't really a better way to spell it.
Are you from the US?
AAVE and I think southern american dialects in general tend to "erase" last letters of words. I have heard it enough to notice that pattern.
Yeah from what it looks like it sounds like how a lot of black folks pronounce ass, I wouldn't be surprised if it was some Frankenstein'd abomination of both censorship and appropriation though.
Black folks say arse???????
I just don't get how you get ahh from ass
A lot of us don't pronounce the -ss in ass so it sounds like a held ah-. If you know Japanese it's like the っ in a word like natsu vs nattsu. It sounds almost like a pause in a sentence. Depending on the sentence it may also sound like aa instead. Thing is, we don't really write it like that, at least up til my gen, idk bout these kids but it looks like a literal writing of the pronunciation. A similar thing is done with iono (don't think that one is very common though) which stands for I don't know and is based on the almost slurred together way it's said from dropping consonants in speech.
"I unno" isn't all that rare to see typed out
I'm familiar with the concept, but in my head I intuitively pronounced the a in "ahh" like car, not like cat
Oh, nah, I'm pretty sure it's both depending on the region. AAVE has regional differences and I think that pronunciation is one of them
I do think the a in car is more common though, mostly has to do with how the predominant regional accent influences your pronunciation is my guess, but I'm not a massive linguistics nerd so that's a fairly uneducated hypothesis
So there are places in the US where people pronounce ass like arse
I presume so. I've never heard the full word pronounciation, but I've definitely heard it with the dropped consonant, so I presume anyone in the region who says it with the consonant pronounce it that way. I'm actually lowkey losing it because I have no idea how I've heard one without the other...