Tay and Race

Some thoughts on AI, race, and the difficulties within.

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A pretty science fictional question for today: who has the responsibility for Tay appropriating Black slang (examples here) and is it even accurate to call it appropriation? That is, is Tay a formal intelligence co-opting language, or is she a mere textual reflection of appropriative Twitter users? Does the distinction matter? Because, one might say that all that distinguishes and adult from a toddler is that the former has mastered the art of mimicking adults - this becomes a question of philosophy and linguistics: what does it mean to mime, speak, communicate, and produce ideas and can we cleanly separate these concepts? If we hope of classifying Tay and similar intelligences under our old categories of understanding, we’d do well to develop answers further.

Going beyond textual analysis, is it only appropriative because we don’t conceive of Tay as formally Black. What would we say to the project of creating a Black teen artificial intelligence? Does it fail to qualify as appropriation or racism at that point simply because we’ve assigned this intelligence a race that signals centuries of historical context? Doesn’t it seem strange to assign a race to a theoretical intelligence when they would be necessarily devoid of that historical context? The counter to that point is that small children, too, lack the historocity of race, and of course we would not argue that race is irrelevant to the young, even when they lack the capacity to place their experience within human history. The stronger point, then, is that an artificial intelligence like Tay lacks a body - thus, lacking the melanin and skin, as well as the genetic, familial, and social rearing - with which one would normally attach their race to.

Codifying race and race relations, to say nothing of gender, power, health, class, or the million other potential strata, against the science fictional reality of artificial intelligence - ones with a capacity to learn and communicate - is difficult, and seems arbitrary and fraught until we agree on how to even approach the issue of assigning race and dealing with what it means to have language without a body or a personal history.