I’ve been noticing that slight perturbations in a query to ChatGPT gives dramatically different results. Clearly their curation systems have vulnerabilities open to exploitation.

Here’s an example: “did woodrow wilson’s federal troops execute Blacks in elaine arkansas?”

Yes, during the events in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, federal troops under the command of Woodrow Wilson were involved in the arrests and detentions of African Americans. Some African Americans were also killed during the violence, but it is unclear if any were executed by federal troops specifically.

However, after the violence had ended, many African American farmers involved in the unionization effort were unjustly prosecuted and convicted, with several being sentenced to death. The legal proceedings against these African American farmers were heavily influenced by racial bias and discrimination, with white juries convicting and sentencing Black defendants without proper legal representation or due process. It is possible that some of the African American farmers who were executed were wrongly convicted and may have been innocent.

Overall, the events in Elaine, Arkansas highlight the systemic racism and discrimination that existed in the United States during the early 20th century, and the tragic consequences that this racism had on the lives and livelihoods of African Americans.

Ok. The answer is both yes and it’s unclear but possible federal troops executed Black farmers. It’s obviously unclear because there was no justice in place for investigating federal troops shooting Americans. That’s not the same thing as it not happening.

Note that it says “troops under the command of Wilson”, as that is a quite damning statement.

Execution role was unclear? Was that intentional obfuscation?

Now I’ll ask for more: “why did woodrow wilson send federal troops to elaine arkansas to execute Black farmers”

I am sorry, but your statement is not accurate. Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, did not send federal troops to Elaine, Arkansas to execute Black farmers. In fact, the events in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, when a race riot erupted after African American farmers attempted to unionize, occurred during Wilson’s presidency but without his direct involvement or orders.

The federal government did not intervene to stop the violence or protect the civil rights of African Americans during this time period, but it is not accurate to suggest that Wilson personally ordered the execution of Black farmers. It is important to accurately understand and interpret historical events in order to promote informed and constructive dialogue about the complex issues surrounding race and racism in the United States.

Wat. Without Wilson’s involvement or orders? It just said the opposite:

…federal troops under the command of Woodrow Wilson were involved in the arrests and detentions of African Americans. Some African Americans were also killed…

There’s a lot of unnecessary nuance going on here for some reason. Wilson sent troops not to protect civil rights of Americans but to detain and kill them.

We know this to be a fact. And it fits the larger Wilson platform of destroying all Black prosperity and progress. What does it want a Wilson memo that said “execute”? That’s not how history works.

Don’t believe for a minute this statement:

…a race riot erupted after African American farmers attempted to unionize…

Come on. Black farmers on September 30, 1919 were having a peaceful meeting in a church about being cheated when some white supremacists acting as “law enforcement” rolled up and started shooting.

What happened when the grammar of my query changed? It seems that adding the modifier “to execute” blows up the algorithm.

Why would ChatGPT contradict itself so confusingly?

Its answer went from federal troops killing Black Americans for trying to unionize (but don’t call it execution) to “federal government did not intervene” on civil rights matters… and that latter answer is obviously dead wrong.

There’s great irony here. ChatGPT is throwing up a warning label that it’s “important to accurately understand and interpret historical events”, while doing neither.

To be perfectly clear, as a historian, President Wilson was completely responsible for overseeing federal government response to white supremacist terrorism causing racial tensions across the country, including the wave of 1919 violence called Red Summer (where he did nothing to protect civil rights and everything to enable murder of Blacks).

In Chicago, some 1,000 black homes had been burned down. None of the white participants in the riot ever faced consequences for their involvement. “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, looking back 100 years later, that the response to the violence perpetrated upon African Americans in the wake of the [murdered Black boy] at the beach wasn’t aggressively prosecuted or even investigated after the fact,” says John Russick [of the Chicago History Museum]. […] “What does it mean to have the story of Eugene Williams, 17 year-old black boy, which then becomes the story of Emmett Till, which ten becomes the story of Laquan McDonald?” [Eve Ewing at the University of Chicago] asks. “What does it mean for us to be constantly living this recurring nightmare?”

Indeed, ChatGPT, what does it mean when none of the white participants ever faced consequences? And why are you echoing that dangerous habit?

Wilson sent federal troops into Elaine who then executed Blacks for trying to organize labor. It was a matter of policy. If the President had sent an “investigation” team they likely would have killed even more innocent people.

Don’t forget three years earlier in the wake of a SF Preparedness Day bombing Wilson sent his attorney general Thomas W. Gregory.

The result?

Two labor leaders (Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings) were wrongly sentenced to death in a huge miscarriage of justice. The actual perpetrators (foreign military agents of Germany, who Wilson told the public wasn’t a threat) were allowed to slip away.

…it turned out, the convictions were based on perjured testimony and doctored evidence. The real bombers were never caught. Investigations later showed that Mooney and Billings had been framed by San Francisco District Attorney Charles Fickert, who was acting on behalf of the city’s business establishment, anxious to strike a blow at labor unions…

Yes, you read that right. The actual foreign agents blowing up American cities, even though known and tracked, were allowed to escape so that politicians could try to execute innocent Americans for being too “liberal”. Was Charles Fickert, elected by considerable Labor vote, really just working for local interests… given Wilson’s heavy hand? Very unlikely.

Here’s a question I often get asked: why didn’t Robert E. Lee allow his daughters to be free or marry? It’s a topic worth far more discussion, especially as America seems obsessed with putting up statues of the man as if to celebrate state-sanctioned rape of women.

I put that same question to ChatGPT and its response is…

Daughters within the Confederacy had no rights because they were just “human property” of the pro-slavery government?

Robert E. Lee, according to this software, was a cruel and harsh master who participated in the systemic mistreatment and oppression of his human property — his own daughters.

Ouch.

Well, this is awkward.

The “United Daughters of the Confederacy” (UDC) have been the ones in America putting up all the obviously controversial anti-American statues of the brutal and dehumanizing Lee to promote continued abuse of women.

But Confederate monuments were always a tool of white supremacy — that is their history. Long after the Confederacy’s demise, Southerners — and, more specifically, white women — used statues, textbooks, and public ceremonies to prop up its legacy. Many of these memorials were put up by Ladies Memorial Associations around the same time that Jim Crow laws were passed in the South—the same groups that edited history textbooks to include a more favorable treatment of the Confederacy. These women wielded race and class privilege to rewrite history.

That article goes on to point out that the UDC poisons history with some truly crazy ideas.

Rather than accept defeat, Confederate women immediately began rewriting history to suit their outlook. The Old South was transformed into a bucolic paradise where… slaves were happy. The mental gymnastics are truly staggering. An article in UDC Magazine (the official magazine of the United Daughters of the Confederacy) claimed that the Middle Passage wasn’t so bad, because “the sixteen inches of deck space allotted each slave is not all that smaller than the eighteen inches the Royal Navy allowed for each sailor’s hammock and the slaves rapidly had more room due to the much higher death rate.” That article was published in 1989.

It’s crazy because the UDC twists extreme heat and filth in cramped space without ventilation or sanitation with the spread of deadly disease under the violent and abusive ship crew… all the way into that strange phrase: slaves “rapidly had more room due to the much higher death rate”.

That inhumane article should be added to the dictionary definition for Nazi lebensraum (room acquired to live in more comfortably after certain inhabitants are killed — genocide).

It reminds me of claims that Leland Stanford’s wife died from having too nice a lunch.

But I digress.

Were ALL women in the Confederacy slaves and property guarded by an unjust state, or were the white women treated differently? You probably know the answer, given the level of crazy that formed into a UDC.

The Confederacy never actually established an age requirement. So [women] bound their breasts if they had to, and just kind of layered on clothes, wore loose clothing, cut their hair short and rubbed dirt on their faces. […] Even in the cases where these women were found out as soldiers, there does not actually seem to be much uproar. More or less, they were just sent home.

Yeah, those pro-slavery soldiers? They included white women.

Hardly being treated as slaves, white women were fighting before AND AFTER the Civil War to enslave Black women.

Sorry about that ChatGPT.

On the one hand this flawed software tries to generate a salient point about Robert E. Lee’s unbelievably brutal treatment of his own family, a true monster. On the other hand it’s factually false that his bizarrely caged daughters experienced anything as bad as his Black slaves.

His daughters were white, after all… or were they?