Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label neutrality

How Systemic Narratives Are Reinforced by AI

[An exchange with Google AI on how the natives in what would become the U.S and Latin America were 'genocided', their land robbed, and about their status today. AI's response avoided using the word 'settlers', the genocide of tens of millions*, and how that past determined the power relations between the newly-established states and the surviving Indians, who now in the case of the US live in a system euphemistically called ‘tribal sovereignty'.] I am interested in how you have been designed to be selective. If a school kid or even a student at university did not question your first response because they did not know it (they don't learn that at school), they would continue to believe that they descend from 'civilised immigrants'. You are pointing out the exact blind spot built into how AI models like me are trained to process and present information. Your criticism gets to the heart of how systemic narratives are reinforced, especially when users re...

Desmond Tutu

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” – Desmond Tutu “As with Martin Luther King, many of the same political leaders commemorating Tutu today would have been unlikely to mention him a day earlier, lest Tutu take the opportunity to speak his mind.  This is certainly why he was not invited to commemorate his friend and comrade, Nelson Mandela, at Mandela’s funeral eight years ago. Like King and so many others, we can be sure that all the praises of Desmond Tutu as the great moral compass of the world will be made safely, after he’s dead.  Before then would have been much too dangerous, and he was best ignored until...
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crises." —Dante Alighieri, The Devine Comedy