Ghost in the Machine

From a PBS e-mail:

Ghost in the Machine is an investigative documentary exposing the buried history of artificial intelligence as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power long before it entered everyday life.

Rejecting the notion of AI as inevitable or objective, the film traces how myths of progress and efficiency have obscured deeper political and cultural agendas, revealing the ideological foundations beneath the systems now reshaping modern society. Who built these systems, whose values do they encode, and who do they benefit?

The documentary, by filmmaker Valerie Veatch, airs on Independent Lens this coming Monday.

Which prompts me to paste here a comment that I left on an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast, “Harvard Professor Teddy Svoronos on AI in the Classroom”:

I found this a remarkably cheerful and uncritical discussion of generative AI, which has made the work of evaluating student writing a hellscape for many instructors. It’s telling that the University of Chicago has banned gen AI in first-year law courses and some undergrad courses. UC Berkeley has banned gen AI in all law courses. Harvard, though, is all in, encouraging faculty to use gen AI and offering a $699 course in entrepreneurship taught by AI clones of business faculty. At the same time, Harvard has closed its Writing Center, where a student could work one-to-one with another human. Arizona State is repackaging course materials in bits and pieces for use in online course offerings. At SUNY Buffalo, the Chief AI Officer has advanced the idea of having a chatbot give students oral exams. And Texas Tech is using AI to comb through syllabi for suspect texts (anything foregrounding sexual orientation or gender identity).

There are many, many questions to ask here, and a need for a much more critical perspective.

[A habitual OCA reader will recognize that most of my examples come from recent posts.]