Artificial intelligence and a child cannot be compared. Why does “Humans in the Loop” bother me?

in Children and curriculaJohn Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, describes children as active learners whose current experiences are dynamic and constitute a “developing force” necessary for learning. According to him, learning should involve establishing a relationship between the mind and what is learned. Without “an organic connection to what the child has already seen, felt and loved,” the child will lose interest, and learning will become stressful. Learning is therefore not merely about filling a child’s mind with external input, but rather about participation, discovery and active inquiry.

The primacy of a child’s experiences and exploratory instincts for learning makes it incomparable to the automated process of feeding data into artificial intelligence. To say the opposite is to falsely attribute the consciousness of experience to an AI model. This is what the film does in its unjustified comparison. It elevates artificial intelligence to the status of child-like innocence and the ability to change, while, at the same time, it curates the way a child learns and transfers complete control of its learning to external authorities.

The film is also full of contradictions in its comparison between a child and an artificial intelligence. In its depiction of Naama’s childhood, it shows her in the wilderness of the forest as a young girl, interacting with a porcupine and roaming freely in nature. Years later, her teenage daughter, Danno, also ventures into the forest and struggles to find her way out. In the process, she learns how to navigate with the help of a porcupine, and sheds light on how children learn through active interaction with the environment. In these scenes, the film depicts how Adivasi children learn about nature in existential unity and oneness with animals, insects, plants, trees and rivers. However, in the next moment, it enters into comparing the AI ​​to a child, which undermines the aspect of Adivasi life where children grow and learn in intimacy and affinity with their environment.

The film attempts to delve into complex epistemological issues by exposing biases in AI models due to the dominance of knowledge and representation largely borrowed from the dominant Western framework. It depicts the importance of local knowledge and indigenous perspectives and calls for their inclusion in the monolithic, one-sided information fed into the AI ​​model. However, it does not raise any serious question about AI itself, or invasion of privacy, as every human movement is monitored, categorized, and fed into AI models. It never challenges the inherent character of AI as a universal and unifying tool. The broker itself escapes scrutiny.

Even more surprising is that the film, in raising questions about knowledge and representation and comparing AI to children, does not take into account how humans learn. It undermines the natural curiosity and sense of wonder inherent in a child by describing it as akin to clay, moldable to one’s liking. In this, the child is deprived of any agency in his own learning process. There is a troubling analogy that equating learning with training reduces education to a trivial transfer of information. It is assumed that the child is fed information from the outside and his biases can be removed once adults intervene, and these processes can be repeated using artificial intelligence. Just like AI, the child is not an active participant in its learning, but merely a recipient. In trying to expose Western biases in the field of artificial intelligence, the film falls into the deadly trap of taking humanity away from the child and assigning much of it to an entity with the word “artificial” in its very name.

The writer is a researcher at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice