I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me so I decided to back check her facts.

(she was right, BTW)

Now I’ve been using Microsoft’s Copilot which is baked into Bing right now. It’s fairly robust and sure it has it’s quirks but by and large it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own and gives a breakdown of whatever your looking for followed by a list of sources it got it’s information from.

So I asked it a simple straightforward question:

“I need a breakdown on the theory behind human race classifications”

And it started to do so. quite well in fact. it started listing historical context behind the question and was just bringing up Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the “founder of racial classifications.”

But right in the middle of the breakdown on him all the previous information disappeared and said, I’m sorry I can’t provide you with this information at this time.

I pointed out that it was doing so and quite well.

It said that no it did not provide any information on said subject and we should perhaps look at another subject.

Now nothing i did could have fallen under some sort of racist context. i was looking for historical scientific information. But Bing in it’s infinite wisdom felt the subject was too touchy and will not even broach the subject.

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

PS. Google had no trouble giving me the information when i requested it. i just had to look up his name on my own.

    • @[email protected]English
      20•7 months ago

      Skin color is irrelevant when trying to validate information. OP thought information may not be correct and tries to fact check via third party means. Found out THEY were wrong, admit it verbatim in the post, and then tells a story on AI censorship. I would advocate for anyone to validate any information from any private accounts before blindly accepting information to be accurate, especially if you are only doing so because you think someone’s skin color makes their information more or less valid.

    • @AceticonEnglish
      16•7 months ago

      You know, actually validating with other sources the information given about racism by anybody, no matter what his or her skin color is, is acting as not a racist.

      It’s those who trust information given by somebody differently dependening on the skin color of that person who are the racists, quite independently of which races they find more trustworthy or less trustworthy - it’s the discrimination on skin color that’s the racism, not the actual skin color of those deemed more or less trustworthy on a subject.

      That the OP even openly admitted that he was wrong and the girl in TikTok was right further indicates that the OP was at least trying not to be a racist, quite unlike your post that presumes that a person’s skin color by itself and considering nothing else (such as for example the place that person grew up in or lives in) determines if they’re trustworthy or not on something that can affect everybody independently of race.

      Just because the “fashionable” modern form of racism has different lists of things that are to be implicitly trusted or distruted depending on etnicity that those for “traditional” racists, doesn’t make that version of racism any less match the dictionary definition of “discrimination on racial grounds”.

      • @[email protected]English
        -2•7 months ago

        If OP wanted to learn more, there are tons of black people who have written books, articles, etc on racism and yes their lived experiences matter and should be listened to when talking about systemic oppression.

    • @kromemEnglish
      4•7 months ago

      Any specific group is going to have a subjective and not objective view of a topic, that can sometimes lead to unexpected outcomes, such as black people on average preferring to interact with more racist white people than less racist white people:

      Previous research has suggested that Blacks like White interaction partners who make an effort to appear unbiased more than those who do not. We tested the hypothesis that, ironically, Blacks perceive White interaction partners who are more racially biased more positively than less biased White partners, primarily because the former group must make more of an effort to control racial bias than the latter. White participants in this study completed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of racial bias and then discussed race relations with either a White or a Black partner. Whites’ IAT scores predicted how positively they were perceived by Black (but not White) interaction partners, and this relationship was mediated by Blacks’ perceptions of how engaged the White participants were during the interaction. We discuss implications of the finding that Blacks may, ironically, prefer to interact with highly racially biased Whites, at least in short interactions.