"It's a kind of grave-digging and incredibly disrespectful to the real Anne Frank and her family."
The Anne Frank Experience
You're probably familiar with Anne Frank, a European Jewish girl whose posthumously-published diary documents her time hiding from Nazi persecution, before being apprehended and killed in a concentration camp at age 15.
Unfortunately for humanity, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI has summoned up an AI-generated version of Frank that feels like both an affront to her memory and a grim sign of things to come in the world of education.
While there's a veneer of the historical character, it also shows all the flaws of OpenAI-style chatbots: overly courteous, unhelpfully vague, and so uplifting that it borders on wax museum-creepy.
What's worse, as Berlin historian Henrik Schönemann discovered while experimenting with the bot, is that it seems trained to avoid pinning blame for Frank's death on the actual Nazis responsible for her death, instead redirecting the conversation in a positive light.
"Instead of focusing on blame, let's remember the importance of learning from the past," the bot told Schönemann. "How do you think understanding history can help us build a more tolerant and peaceful world today?"
Crash Course
It's true that the real Frank expressed a certain commitment to forgiveness — "in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart," goes one famous passage from her diary — it's puzzling to see such an iconic account of genocide twisted into such a balmy sentiment.
"It's a kind of grave-digging and incredibly disrespectful to the real Anne Frank and her family," Schönemann wrote. "She, her memory and the things she wrote get abused for our enjoyment, with no regard or care for the real person. How anyone thinks this is even remotely appropriate is beyond me." In addition, he added, the bot "violates every premise of Holocaust-education."
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https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-anne-frank-blame-holocaust