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.
The world has changed massively in my lifetime, when I was a kid fascinated by animation it was flickbooks, cinefilm stop motion, or 8 frames of pixel art. Now there's blender and a hundred other open sources tools as well as almost infinite learning materials online all free and made by people passionate about the topic. The same is true for everything, if you wanted to reach something the library might have had a brief article in Britannica but now you can instantly get into real detail. These things have hugely improved many people's lives, and they're growing.
Open street map is fast becoming the best and often only map in many areas, thousands of normal people working together on something they believe in are helping practically change the world for the better. Aid agencies, cyclists, local businesses and workers all use maps derived from osm. Drawing in roads and buildings from satellite images, looking up transport information, and all the small things build up to a huge resource that's freely accessible for everyone's benefit.
I could list similar examples for hours, thingiverse where people share designs to be 3d printed and work together improving them - for people like me with limited money it's a total life changing resource, and 3d printing is evolving too - ai design tools are already starting to turbocharge this process, we're not far from someone being able to explain in their native language a problem they have and be guided through cresting an effective and cheap solution using locally available parts.
The world isn't perfect yet but it's a lot better than it was.