On the second Tuesday of October, a small subset of humanity celebrates Ada Lovelace Day in honour of the 19th Century computing pioneer. There are film screenings and museum visits, and bloggers are encouraged to write about women’s achievements in STEM.
Most distinctive of the events is a Wikipedia Editathon to set the record straight and add as many fully fleshed-out entries about female scientists, engineers and mathematicians as can be done in the span of an afternoon. Given that more than 80% of Wikipedia’s biographical articles are about men (and this reflects the wider ratio of coverage and recognition), the editathons are an act of resistance.
Which may be why xAI’s Grok has been getting into the same spirit. Not generally known for woke activism, the Large Language Model recently composed an article for its competing site Grokipedia that nevertheless helped redress the balance. The entry chronicles the wartime work of a member of the Manhattan Project’s Montreal Lab and the later designer of Canada’s first nuclear reactors. It details an extraordinary career.
“As one of the pioneering women in Canadian nuclear physics during an era when female scientists faced significant barriers to entry and advancement,” writes the artificial intelligence, “Sargent demonstrated remarkable resilience in balancing her professional commitments with personal challenges, though details of her family life remain largely private.”
The Grokipedia page ‘Bernice Weldon Sargent’ is a 2,700 word article that cites 25 sources, and it was ‘fact-checked by Grok 7 months ago’.
The trouble is, Dr. Sargent was a man. A cisgender man. He was the man depicted in the photo above. He did have a first name now more commonly given to women, and when given to boys nowadays it’s spelt Burnice, but Dr. Sargent was born at the turn of the century when his own spelling was briefly popular. Any one of the 25 sources cited by the article would have correctly used male pronouns for this expert in beta decay processes, but Grokipedia uses female ones throughout.
On Wikipedia, one could have made the edits directly, but the AI-written encyclopedia only allows for ‘suggested’ edits. I submitted a suggested overhaul of the article before I found out that nothing on Grokipedia has been added or changed since the Spring, even though this fact has not been acknowledged by the company. This male physicist will be mis-gendered, and mis-sexed, on a global internet for the foreseeable future.
What can we do, and who is responsible, when lies are spoken about us by something that is not human? Some of us may be about to find out. The scarier thing is when it tells lies about you that you never hear, but that affect your life. You mysteriously get turned down for a job and never know why. You’re rejected at the bank for your mortgage renewal.
I don’t feel empowered to change that, but I can point out what I notice with the small platform I have.
For now, I can talk about a man named Bernice.
