Reflection – Guest Lecture With Lucas Wright
This week I am reflecting on the guest lecture with Lucas Wright on the importance of developing a critical understanding of AI and what it means to have AI literacy. Wright stresses that educators and students alike must understand that although AI can be an effective assistant to completing tasks, there are border societal impacts.
For example, when asking chat GPT to formulate an image of a traditional Canadian family, the image Wright received was the hegemonic idea of a white Canadian family that enjoys being out in nature. What defines a traditional family? What about Indigenous communities, the traditional owners of these lands? Wright mentions:
Bias is built into these models…these models erase identities so again as we’re thinking about teaching and learning with these models, how are we going to help our students to identify these biases and how are we going to identify these biases ourselves?
(Wright, 2025)
A majority of AI users are falling into the trap of believing everything they receive. In order to think critically about the information that AI models consider factual, it is going to take an intentional approach to questioning what is considered as knowledge.
I decided to test this myself and asked Chat GPT to send me an image depicting “an impoverished family”
Here is the image I received:
It is interesting how the family depicted is Asian and eating rice. I am just picturing a young elementary student starting to form harmful ideologies in their mind that maybe all Asians are poor and live in wooden sheds.
I feel this is the reason why I admire films and their potential to illuminate diverse realities in society. I am reminded of the 2007 film The Visitor directed by Tom McCarthy. The Visitor carefully delves into the complex struggles faced by immigrants in Western societies. It is a film that illuminates the daunting anxieties and uncertainties endured by BIPOC individuals. The decision to showcase immigrants as resilient and self-determining in this film confronts stereotypes of passivity and reliance on white people. Ultimately The Visitor serves as a reminder of agency and the importance of community in the immigrant experience, urging viewers to understand the nuanced humanity of people of the global majority.
The Visitor is a film that tackles the very real challenges of being an immigrant in the West. There are certain pressures and challenges that people of the global majority face that are not common knowledge. The Visitor highlights the fear around uncertainty that many BIPOC carry from day to day: not knowing what day might be their last, not knowing what day they could be unjustly arrested, and not knowing what day their mask requires modification. This exhausting and repetitive cycle becomes part of your identity, part of your daily practice. Something as simple as taking the bus or riding the subway are tasks that should not be undermined for their simplicity, they too can harbour great fear and uncertainty. Moving with fear instead of conviction and confidence becomes the new norm for racialized individuals which slowly drains us of our humanity. Especially in the case of being an undocumented immigrant or an asylum seeker, your life does not feel like it truly belongs to you; your life moves in contingency with your ability to remain unseen in volatile white spaces.
Something I admire about The Visitor is how the film stresses the importance of community for immigrants. Western films have an unusual alliance to represent immigrants as helpless, lonely, and not equipped with agency. Although there are certainly layers of loneliness and waves of helplessness that many immigrants feel, eventually, we emerge; eventually we find our people, our communities. For Tarek, the main character, it was his drummer friends at the park, Zainab found her community of artists, and Mouna found companionship with Walter. The representation of immigrants as functioning people with agency and the ability to create love and prosperity within their lives is important because it challenges narratives that position white people as saviours in our stories. The reality is we can help ourselves, we can show up for one another, and that rather than “saving”, what most immigrants need from white people is recognition that we too are people with agency. I hope to be a part of making a film that demonstrates the nuanced and diverse personalities that people of the global majority possess.
References
Klokline Cinema. (2018). 2007 The Visitor Official Trailer 1 HD Overture Films, Participant Productions. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ODmxTlA6Sw
