BUZZ
The tool is ‘divorced from the context [of] how they’re living life generally’
A professor of social work at Columbia University worries that, as the use of artificial intelligence continues to grow at a breakneck pace, black teens will not have their “racial stress” correctly diagnosed by the tool.
Riana Elyse Anderson, who according to her faculty page “has been working with Black youth and their families to ‘dropkick’ racism and engage in resistance for a healthy mind, body, and spirit,” noted in a recent interview with Rolling Out.com that while teens are asking A.I. about virtually any topic, it’s “divorced from the context [of] how they’re living life generally.”
Anderson said after a racial incident, A.I. may just “spit out” a diagnosis of something like depression, devoid of the surrounding circumstances with which someone is dealing.
For example, following a national op-ed she wrote (presumably this one in USA Today in which she claimed the Trump administration only cares about anti-white racism), Anderson said received an email which had just one word in the subject line: the n-word.
And I was so jarred by it. It had me throw my phone, I winced, my whole body tensed up. The whole day my mind was trained around, “If I had just created a better filter on my email, if I could have just anticipated that.” I was doing all of this “if I had just done this thing, then this racism wouldn’t have happened to me.” I’m trained, and I still was disrupted for a full day by racism.
In addition, Anderson noted as black youth are currently experiencing a “greater rate of suicidality,” an A.I. might respond to a young person’s query with suicide statistics — which could be interpreted as an actual “solution” by the user.
As director and developer of EMBRace — Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race — at the University of Pennsylvania ten years ago, Anderson helped support black families “navigate” and decrease so-called racial stress.
According to its website, EMBRace is the “first reported racial socialization intervention for adolescents and their parents” and uses “a culturally-relevant theoretical model to explain how racial socialization practices are both stressful for families to initiate and used to cope with the racial stress youth experience.”
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