AI poses threat to Indigenous culture, knowledge, creativity

It’s the beginning of the school year and the now-annual conversation every teacher and professor has to have with students about the ethics of using artificial intelligence.

It used to be that computers were a tool primarily used to express an individual’s creativity, critical thought and support their research.

Nowadays, and especially since the invention of the internet, computers come with AI programs that instantly summarize vast amounts of data, create content and images, and even write 10-page essays based on information found on sites from across the world.

This is why AI, whether people like it or not, is basically theft – or the action of using someone else’s ideas and creations without the consent of the original creator.

When data found through AI finds its way into educational assignments, this is often where plagiarism, or passing off ideas that are not your own, enters.

Another word for the use of AI, therefore, is cheating.

Using AI isn’t always a problem, of course.

AI can be a good tool by helping a person find the definition of a word, know the basics of mainstream history, or the biography of an author.

AI becomes a huge problem if what is required is critical thought, a complicated answer, or knowledge inadequately covered by the content a platform draws upon.

For Indigenous Peoples, AI has become a bit of an adversary as the cost of the technology far outweighs the benefits.

As I’ve written many times, there is the fact that data centres that deliver AI require large amounts of energy and water which draw heavily on electrical grids, strain ecological systems, and produce tons of greenhouse gases that threaten Indigenous cultures and traditions.

There is also the fact that governments and private interests – due to the above reasons alone – most often try to build AI data centres on the traditional territories of Indigenous communities and not near cities and towns.

There are the issues of intellectual property, ownership, and who profits off AI content.

AI threatens Indigenous Peoples another way, too.

For more than 150 years, the world has produced much misinformation, lies, and miseducation about Indigenous Peoples.

Much of it is only being corrected now, as Indigenous professionals, elders, and knowledge keepers work alongside now-competent Canadians to correct the historical record and produce information based in truth and to advance reconciliation.

In other words, we have 150-plus years of biased, stereotypical and incorrect information about Indigenous Peoples and just a few in which legitimate, culturally based, and correct Indigenous-authored knowledge, creativity, and content have offset it.

This is precisely why AI is so dangerous to Indigenous life.

When asked for information about Indigenous Peoples, AI programs most often reproduce false facts, suggest harmful stereotypes, misinterpret languages, and confuse and collapse unique histories of nations, laws, and traditions into others.

This is harmful onto itself but made worse when those in positions of power, such as premiers, police, CEOs and professors, have their long histories of miseducation re-enforced and they do and say harmful things as a result.

Indigenous people who try to share good information online don’t always cure the problem because AI platforms have virtually no ethics.

For instance, if sacred cultural knowledge is published on a site, AI platforms will take this without permission or respect, reproducing the same extractive methods used in the past to commodify and steal Indigenous knowledge.

Indigenous Peoples are even being replaced by AI.

This week, reports emerged about a website called We-News.com, which is owned by a company based in Hong Kong and reports on events in Canada’s North.

One of the We-News.com “reporters” is named Leah Qammaniq, whose bio states she is “an Inuk journalist” raised in Nunavut and writes about Inuit histories and politics.

There is even a smiling photo of Qammaniq on the site.

But Qammaniq isn’t real. Like the other reporters on the We-News.com website, she is an AI creation.

This has not stopped Qammaniq from being credited with dozens of stories that are plagiarized versions of work taken from outlets such as CBC news, northern newspapers, and online encyclopedias. In other words: real life Indigenous people.

The endgame of this is a world that doesn’t need Indigenous cultures, knowledge and people as they can simply be replaced as smiling fakes.

I realize at this point I am starting to sound like an old man shaking his fist at the sky, but the threat posed by AI is very real.

This is why copyright protections for Indigenous-created content, accountability for those harmfully reproducing or replacing Indigenous-created content, and legal guidelines for ethical and responsible use of AI must exist.

At the moment, virtually none of that exists.

But fake Indigenous people do.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca