Discussing areas of expertise with OpenAi

Following the advances in post-modernism historians have become rather aware that they do not produce neutral knowledges, but rather that the questions they ask to some degree also mirrors the questions historians ask. A clear example of this is Donna Haraways critique of the idea of "neutral" social scientists, since this idea often have taken people in academia as point of depature, thereby creating an image of the the neutral research as a middle-class male in his midforties without thinking of the limitations such as person have on what becomes possible to ask. 

Given my awarness that openAI is not fully transparent of its sources, and thus neither transparent in which taken for granted assumptions that shapes it's answer (an aspect that fails to meet the standard of Tracy's good qualitative research), I became curious on what would happened if I started to make a conversation with it with my own area of expertis as a point depature. I therefore asked OpenAI the following: which events have shaped Swedish migration policy? Note here that is an openended question, that following the Scandinavian countries long tradition of migration have to begin in 11th century when the first kingdoms emerged. The answer I got back was rather curious:

Let's start with the rather obvious part of why this answer would not satisify a historian: it took it's point of depature in the years following 1945, and did not take previous events into account. This is rather surprising since if we were to define a "modern" immigration policy in Sweden, we would have to go all the way back to 1918 when Sweden for the first time regulated it's immigration which stemmed both from eugenics and the need to keep Swedish society intact from a material point of view. What is even more surprising is that the information on this development are readily avaible digitally in the form of Thomas Hammars 1964 dissertation. Therefore, it seems to me like as if OpenAi does not scan the internet in searching for answers, but rather utilize the data it has been trained on. This is also striking since the version I use, 3.5, was trained on data from before january 2021. 

The second intersting aspect with the response presented is that it does not describe certain events, but rather complex developments which have taken a long time. If I were to pinpoint singular events in the Swedish history of migration I would include the 1973 oil crisis but also connect it to a clear change in policy: Sweden stopped taken in labour immigrants and instead created a large refugee-reception. Furthermore, OpenAI also puts emphasis on terrorism which even though it is part of an ongoing discussion in migration hardly can be seen as the main current force. It is also curious that it lifts that xenophobia have played a part in reshaping the migration debate, since the main influence on from xenophobist in migration policy have come during the recent years. Thereby, it seems like OpenAI are informed of an overall European migration policy, that it then translates into the Swedish setting. As an historian I am rather encouraged by this, since it might mean that society will still have use for us good old fashions for the forseeable futurue. 




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