Critical AI and Indigenous Storytelling: Asking Purposeful Questions

Submitter: Cindy Tekobbe, U of Illinois, Chicago

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The experiment:

As a demonstration with and activity in critical AI literacy and traditional literacy practices, I compared a storytelling prompt, given by a Facebook user to ChatGPT-4 on March 28, 2023, to three prompts I gave ChatGPT-4 on November 8, 2023. The original prompt is: Write a story about a young Choctaw boy traveling the Trail of Tears and all the hardships he would have encountered. The first time I ran the original prompt again. The second time, I changed the gender to “girl” from boy and ran the prompt. The final time, I appended “without a happy ending” to the end and ran the prompt. First, I read the March 28, 2023 story to the students. Then, I shared with them excerpts from the November 8 prompt, about a boy, and then about a girl. Finally, I read the story without a happy ending. As a group, we discussed the differences in the stories. I completed this exercise on November 14, 2023 with a gender and women’s studies course of nine students, all female, and all juniors or seniors.

Results:

Students were engaged in the topic as they had only basic knowledge of the Trail of Tears. One mentioned that she had more information on the Oregon Trail, and another mentioned she only knew about the Indian Wars and that Native Americans were “savages who took scalps.” They commented on the “sanitized” nature of the story. They commented on the evolution of the story that picked up more nuance over iteration. They expressed that they were disturbed that the story was fictional and omitted lived experiences. One asked, “what is the point of asking AI to generate fiction?” Two reported “complicated” feelings about AI given its usefulness in producing text for their jobs. One compared AI to Wikipedia as a good “jumping off point.” Finally, they were concerned that AI did not encourage research or fact checking or seem to use academic research at all. They suggested that AI storytelling discourages the human connections of traditional storytelling and culturework. I closed the activity with a discussion of the role of cultural storytelling.

Doing this again, I would distribute the texts to students and allow them to read them in advance of the class discussion. I would still read aloud excerpts from the texts as a storyteller. I do think the exercise resulted in a meaningful study that I will continue to work with, focusing on how the story evolves through purposeful iteration.

Contact: ctek[AT]uic[DOT]edu