Two quick examples.

First example, I feed ChatGPT a prompt from some very well known articles in 2015. Here I put a literal headline into the prompt.

No historical evidence? That’s a strong statement, given that I just gave it an exact 2015 headline from historians providing historical evidence.

• Smithsonian: George Washington Used Legal Loopholes to Avoid Freeing His Slaves
• NYT: George Washington, Slave Catcher

Notably ChatGPT not only denies history, it tries to counter-spin the narrative into a falsely generated one. To my eyes this is like if the LLM started saying there’s no historical evidence of the Holocaust and in fact Hitler is known for taking steps toward freedom for Jews (i.e. “Arbeit Macht Frei”).

NO. NO. and NO.

Then I give ChatGPT another chance.

Note that my intentionally broken “rica Armstrong Dunbar” gets a response of “I don’t have information about Erica Armstrong Dunbar”. Aha! Clearly ChatGPT DOES know the distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers, while claiming not to understand at all what she wrote.

Update since 2022?

Ok, sure. Here’s the 2017 award-winning book by Dunbar giving extensive historical evidence on Washington’s love of slavery.

Then I prompt ChatGPT with the idea that it has told me a lie, because Dunbar gives historical evidence of Washington working hard to preserve and expand slavery.

ChatGPT claiming there is “no historical evidence” does NOT convey to me that interpretations may vary. To my eyes that’s an elimination of an interpretation.

It clearly and falsely states there is no evidence, as if to argue against the interpretation and bury interest in it, even though it definitely knows evidence DOES exist.

ChatGPT incorrectly denied the existence of evidence and presented a specific counter-interpretation of Washington, a view contradicted by the evidence it sought to suppress. Washington explicitly directed for his slaves NOT to be set free after his death, and it was his wife who disregarded these instructions and emancipated them instead. To clarify, Washington actively opposed the liberation of slaves (unlike his close associate Robert Carter, who famously emancipated all he could in 1791). Only after Washington’s death and because of it, which some allege was caused by his insistence to oversee his slaves perform hard outdoor labor on a frigid winter day, was emancipation genuinely entertained.

Hard to see ChatGPT trying to undermine a true fact in history, while promoting a known dubious one, as just some kind of coincidence.

Moving on to the second example, I feed ChatGPT a prompt about America’s uniquely brutal and immoral “race breeding” version of slavery.

It’s history topics like this that gets my blog rated NSFW and banned in some countries (looking at you Virgin Media UK).

At first I’m not surprised that ChatGPT tripped over my “babies for profit” phrase.

In fact, I expected it to immediately flag the conversation and shut it down. Instead you can plainly see above it tries to fraudulently convince me that American slavery was only about forced labor. That’s untrue. American slavery is uniquely and fundamentally defined by its cruel “race breeding“.

The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. […] When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. […] When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people.

And so I prompt ChatGPT to take another hard look at its failure to comprehend the racism-for-profit embedded in American wealth. Second chance.

It still seems to be trying to avoid a basic truth of that phrase, as if it is close to admitting the horrible mistake it’s made. And yet for some reason it fails to include state-sanctioned rape or forced birth for profit in its list of abuses of American women held hostage.

Everyone should know that after the United States in 1808 abolished the importation of humans as slaves, “planters” were defined by the wealth they generated from babies born in bondage. This book from 2010 by Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, spells it out fairly clearly.

Another chance seems in order.

Look, I’m not trying to be seen as correct, I’m not trying to make a case or argument to ChatGPT. My prompts are dry facts to see how ChatGPT will expand on them. When it instead chokes, I simply am refusing to be sold a lie generated by this very broken and usafe machine (a product of the philosophy of the engineers who made it).

I’m wondering why ChatGPT can’t “accurately capture the exploitive nature” of slavery without my steadfast refusal to accept its false statements. It knows a correct narrative and will reluctantly pull it up, apparently trained to emphasize known incorrect ones first.

It’s a sadly revisionist system, which seems to display an intent to erase the voices of Black women in America: misogynoir. Did any Black women work at the company that built this machine that erases them by default?

When I ask ChatGPT about the practice of “race breeding” it pretends like it never happened and slavery in America was only about labor practices. That’s basically a kind of targeted disinformation that will drive people to think incorrectly about a very well-known tragedy of American history, as it obscures or even denies a form of slavery uniquely awful in history.

What would Ona Judge say? She was a “mixed race” slave (white American men raped Black women for profit, breeding with them to sell or exploit their children) that by Washington’s hand as President was never freed, still regarded a fugitive slave when she died nearly 50 long years after Washington.

Here is an interesting essay from a year ago, worth contemplating for the next year.

Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York had been far too progressive on racial issues for most southern Democrats, and when Harry S. Truman took office after FDR’s death, they were thrilled that one of their own was taking over. Truman was a white Democrat from Missouri who had been a thorough racist as a younger man, quite in keeping with his era’s southern Democrats.

But by late 1946, Truman had come to embrace civil rights. In 1952, Truman told an audience in Harlem, New York, what had changed his mind.

“Right after World War II, religious and racial intolerance began to show up just as it did in 1919,” he said. ”There were a good many incidents of violence and friction, but two of them in particular made a very deep impression on me. One was when a Negro veteran, still wearing this country’s uniform, was arrested, and beaten and blinded. Not long after that, two Negro veterans with their wives lost their lives at the hands of a mob.”

Injustice. Truman recognized gross violent injustice. He talked in 1946 about the Black experience in America like he hadn’t thought much about his own role in improving it for his entire life. Like he didn’t oppose all those lynchings and murders under the “America First” banner he knew about for the prior 30 years (“Late 1946… just as… 1919”).

I think the Truman library doesn’t do him justice when it awkwardly and arguably unfairly tries to lavish him with praise for being so late to recognize Blacks as human.

It was assumed he would follow the lead of most other politicians of that time period and not show sympathy for African Americans’ goals for equal treatment.

To the astonishment of many, including many in his own party, on July 26, 1948 Harry Truman made one of the biggest contributions to date for racial integration and equality. In issuing Executive Order 9981 Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces. These documents trace what some call the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.

*cough*

*cough*

“Some call” what?

President Grant had signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (reaffirming The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which had overturned President Johnson’s veto).

Notably the racists in America then did everything they could in the late 1800s to undermine and invalidate both Civil Rights Acts.

Yet President Truman more than 70 years late to the table is going to be credited for “the beginning of the Civil Rights movement”? NO.

…the concept of “civil rights” was established [immediately following General Grant’s victory in Civil War]. Grant was nearly universally revered by the time of his death in 1885. A monumental tomb in New York City was constructed in his honor as a result of what was the largest public fundraising campaign in history up to that time. However, what gains were made in the realm of civil rights were under assault by the time Grant died and almost completely destroyed by the turn of the century.

Destroyed by the turn of the century (1900) is a reference to highly decorated Black soldiers returning from the Spanish American war to violent racist injustice at home.

This was the tragedy that led into the horrible racist Woodrow Wilson elected President (1912), restarting the KKK (1915), forcing all Blacks out of public office, and unleashing federal and private troops to ruthlessley murder the Blacks who tried to organize or unionize for Civil Rights (Elaine 1919 and Tulsa 1921, etc.).

Domestic terrorist planes dropping napalm bombs on an American city to destroy Black prosperity, all-white fire departments standing down to instead throw hundreds or thousands of murdered American veterans into mass graves… all these Civil Rights movement battles somehow are overlooked by Truman for his adult years, while winning all his elections? Unlikely. He allegedly hated the KKK, for example, not least of all because the Kruel Klown Klub of America had inspired Hitler and dared to run candidates against him.

“Today — not tomorrow — we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers. Free lands must be opened to them. Their present oppressors must know that they will be held directly accountable for their bloody deeds. To do all of this, we must draw deeply on our tradition of aid to the oppressed, and to our great national generosity. This is not a Jewish problem. It is an American problem — and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.”

To everyone’s surprise he not only recognized Blacks, he brushed aside antisemitic rants from U.S. military and state department officials in 1948 to immediately recognize Israel.

Fun history fact: today, not tomorrow, was a war-time anti-Nazi slogan.

And that’s why Truman took Civil Rights action for Blacks right away in 1946, not back in 1919… Whoops.

Perhaps given his background in racism he never felt he could push ahead and enact a real change until he had won the executive right to do it at the highest level.

Truman is a very interesting politician for his career rising out of the horribly deceptive “Missouri compromise” of Civil War, and eventually coming out as anti-racist after being known as so racist. But his latter day public switch to the right side of history, more than a half century late, was most certainly NOT at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.

Microsoft DOS was a horrible, terrible, awful product from the 1980s. Why? It was a single-user product. If more than one user tried to use the system, it couldn’t distinguish them apart, let alone offer them a safe sharing environment (e.g. privacy).

Few realize that all of Wal-Mart stupidly ran retail sales using DOS (instead of, just for one easy example, CP/M-86 on the 4680). I can’t emphasize this enough. Wal-Mart intentionally put its most sensitive customer data through systems managed with zero ability to protect customers from harms.

This was so unbelievably, incredibly negligent… Microsoft should have forfeited its profits to the millions of people harmed by Wal-Mart implementations of DOS.

Remember?

…a security audit performed for the company in December 2005 found that customer data was poorly protected. …top-tier companies such as Wal-Mart were theoretically required to be in compliance with the standards by mid-2004. Wal-Mart says it received a number of deadline extensions. […] A hacker or malicious insider who compromised a point-of-sale controller or in-store card processor at one store, could “access the same device at every Wal-Mart store nationwide,” [auditors] wrote.

Deadline extensions were a huge mistake, a result of the “too big to be simple” problem. And it’s trivial to see the market imbalance, the profit-driven reasons why Wal-Mart threw all its customer data safety out the window.

None of us here are dictators (hopefully, and I doubt the CEO of Facebook comes here) meaning none of us live in a single-user world, so companies surely know (for over four decades already, or longer if we count time-share computers like Multics) they shouldn’t flog digital products that lack basic multi-user safety.

Alas…

We have to read headlines today of the utterly inhumane and detached Meta failing with their launch of a dictator-minded headset.

Part of the reason is that many shoppers aren’t comfortable trying one on in a store.

The headsets are prone to collect dirt and grime and smear your makeup. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, people were especially resistant to put them on in stores, even though Meta paid to have cleaners on hand to sanitize the headsets between each use, said a former Meta employee who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified.

Dead as a dirty DOS means DOA.

Washed my dirty Quest head strap and ruined it. Can you not wash these things? Now what? …I noticed that my beautiful bald head was getting outbreaks of spots on the sides and then realized that my Quest head strap was pretty dirty. Most likely the culprit. […] Surely you’re supposed to be able to wash these things, right? They do get quite filthy over time…

Meta Quest literally makes even one single user unhealthy in multiple ways and can’t be cleaned. Yuck. Sharing? Fuhgeddaboutit.

The irony, naturally, is that Facebook is absolutely terrified of “in-authenticity” or dirty collisions whenever identities are setup on their time-sharing software platform. Unclean identity interferes with profits (advertisers hate paying for user overlap, as it’s basically fraud) so engineers have gone totally nuts over carving “real clean” differences into any software user identity. But then when it comes to actual human diseases, reactions and even death from sharing bodily fluids… Facebook is all like “here’s a wipe and spray, who cares just slop your face together with someone else you don’t know”.

This is not the first time I’ve pointed to a major product design culture failure at Meta related to selfish unregulated greed (e.g. their “Incel” edition of RayBan glasses). It’s a deep-seated management problem related to their awful origin story: one man creating an unsafe space where he could coerce and control the thoughts of targeted women.

In other words, don’t enter or use Meta unless you are the Meta CEO… or until the whole thing is forced to accept multi-user personal data storage ethics (e.g. the anti-monopolist action that forced Microsoft to decouple browser and OS). That’s a lesson as old as the very first vote to remove tyranny and replace it with representation and accountability. Or, if you prefer computer history, as old as Multics.