The Washington Post Published an AI Interview With Harriet Tubman and the Internet Isn’t Having it

A new “interview with Harriet Tubman” published in The Washington Post is drumming up controversy. On July 16, the Washington Post published a piece by the writer Gillian Brokell based on an interview conducted with the artificial intelligence version of Harriet Tubman.

Brokell said the interview was conducted via Khanmigo a new artificial intelligence learning tool from Khan Academy. As Brokell noted, Khanmigo  “enables users to have live chats with dozens of simulated historical figures like Abigail Adams, Genghis Khan, Montezuma and Winston Churchill.”

The publication of the piece raised concerns and questions about the ethics of AI and its interact with Black history.

On Tuesday, the Journalist Cici Adams posted a tween accompanied by a screenshot of the piece’s headline.

“Aside from the fact that this is unethical (in both journalism and tech), pay attention to the ways these AI advances are usually used in ways that disparage, exploit, and caricaturize Black folks,” Adams wrote.

Harper’s Bazaar’s Features Director Kaitlyn Greenidge also left a comment on the screenshot.

“The idea that an algorithm written by people who drink in Black death would ever be able to approximate the consciousness of one of our greatest liberators…” she wrote.

Another twitter user pointed out that Black people feared AI being using in such a way.

“Black people said this was going to happen with AI. This is what happens when a bunch of tech bros have no understanding of ethics,” they explained.

In her piece, Brokell noted that she was relieved to find the Tubman simulation used modern conversational language.

“Though still infused with hints of her courage and piety. I was surprised to find “her” asking me questions, too, and that a small part of me wanted to give sincere answers. Still, it was difficult for the bot to say much more than the superficial things most of us learned about her in high school, and “she” failed some of The Washington Post’s accuracy tests,” Brokell wrote.

A Currently Unreliable Source

It’s not uncommon for the introduction of new technologies to at times be harmful towards Black people. During the craze of NFT drawings, Black people were often subjects of offensive art pieces. The rise in AI is proving to be a continuance of the status quo. In her piece, Brokell notes that Khanmigo is still in its beta testing phase and according to its founder Sal Khan, shouldn’t be used or considered to be a fact-checking tool. Although it is hard to understand why “an educational” software would be incapable of providing factual information.

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