Harriet Tubman's Deep Voice

The authors suggest that national investment in the educational utility of automated software comes at an enormous cost, a price paid by the very students that technology aims to convert to history as a lively and accessible field. This “high-tech mimicry” pretends to incarnate the past but instead silences the inflections of time, gender, region, race, or other vocalic variables. Further, the perception that technology is objective or unbiased conceals the vulnerabilities of language models. The authors argue that the illusions of authenticity these bots produce does not bode well for teaching African American history.