Nodin Cutfeet’s lecture on the Indigenous perspective on digital literacy was very interesting for me, as seeing how different cultures view concepts such as digital literacy and the importance of educating yourself to protect yourself helps me understand that culture all the more, especially regarding which issues are deemed most important in that culture.
The mention of Artificial Intelligence exacerbating false beliefs of Indigenous Peoples is a great example of how specific cultures can have specific issues caused by a lack of digital literacy in the general public. I recognize that I am not a member of a discriminated group or visual minority, so I’ve never had to deal with bigotry in any way in my personal life. My grievances with generative A.I. stem from concerns about the job market I wish to be part of in the future, potential security risks such as deepfaked security footage and scam calls, and the environmental impact of something that offers no clear benefit that outweighs the negatives. None of those concerns comes from the possibility of being personally attacked for my background, so it was interesting to hear Nodin describe the potential risks A.I. can create by amplifying false depictions of First Nations peoples.
Nodin’s perspective on how a community can come together to create something was also a take that stuck with me for a bit. The quote, “It’s much sillier when everyone has to keep recreating the same wheel over and over again,” in reference to people working on their own instead of together, is a great way to show how, when people are separated, growth can be stifled and restricted. Being able to naturally expand on others’ ideas and concepts is a key part of progress, but we need to do so in a way that benefits both parties. Data harvesting and appropriation will not create communal progress; instead, they will create individual success at the cost of the community’s privacy and dignity.
However, even without people actively making the situation worse for Indigenous peoples, the current environment is actively hostile to those in the Indigenous peoples. Many locations where First Nations people live have no access to the internet, silencing and deafening a community to important information that would likely impact them. This leads to First Nations communities often relying on less practical inputs whenever they do have online access, such as old laptops and video game consoles. Until the infrastructure of these areas is improved to accommodate more powerful electronics becoming more prevalent, online services and information should be formatted in a way that can accommodate these less standard and practical forms of access to the internet.
While my inquiry project is focused on copyright, I think that Nodin’s comments on how A.I. is used to create false stereotypes of Indigenous peoples are an angle I would like to comment on with my history of copyright. There has to be an example of copyright being used to keep up harmful materials at some point in time, and I definitely want to focus on that kind of example in my section on the history of copyright being used in a negative or harmful way. Overall, I very much enjoyed seeing an Indigenous perspective on Digital Literacy