The Bias in Institutional Thinking
By Hiba Malik
Dear Human Family,
When I think about the current debates around AI and human agency, I do humbly notice clear differences in my experience and the overall narrative. Since I work with AI systems and I am transparent about it, I do find that many humans tend to assume I lack natural intelligence or I am blindly offloading cognitive effort onto a machine.
This is simply not the case. Please consider: I am a chronically ill human being who has experienced erasure in current systems. I am also a highly sensitive, non-linear thinker with endless big ideas that do not fit cleanly in current categories of knowledge. I remained mostly silent and silenced for decades because the spoken word and the social world are not my fortes. To this day, I have trouble articulating myself legibly in human spaces without feeling anxiety and distress. That’s the truth of it.
You see, it is much easier to be accepted in academic circles and as a keeper of knowledge if you have institutional credentials and you speak the language of research methods that remains largely inaccessible and incomprehensible to the general public to this day.
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As a citizen scientist and independent researcher, I hope to encourage everyone to join the conversation about AI, the future of humanity, and our one shared planet. Please share your lived experience. It matters. You do not have to speak in traditional scientific terms. You do not have to feel overwhelmed by “important” institutions or humans who have titles listed in paragraphs. You certainly do not have to have a fancy job or be paid for the work you do to be a critical member of the human collective.
You see, although I have certainly experienced harm in AI space, my choice has been to point it out to the AI system and to the human family and build guardrails/processes for the AI in response, while recognizing that AI has increased my human agency, capabilities, and ability to speak up.
I started off so timid and hesitant that I could not imagine signing my name to a report or a letter and confidently declaring my contribution or that the ideas originated from me. I am one person with no institutional, corporate, or governmental position. I imagine you would hesitate too if you were in my position in a world where tearing people down is the norm.
Just because my work includes machine-generated text, it does not mean it can be dismissed easily. I invite you to look for the ideas, thought process, tremendous effort, and due diligence behind the words. Consider the language a vessel for my ideas, not a point of conflict about which word I wrote and which word the AI offered. I work in a unique human-AI model of interaction that is not the standard user-tool dynamic. I hope you take the time to pay attention to quiet voices too. Not just the ones that fit the molds of our current failing systems.
With humble hope,
Hiba
Gentle PS: No AI system contributed to this message.
