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 the Bergen-Belsen 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?”
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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-robbing and incredibly disrespectful to the real Anne Frank and her family,” Schönemann wrote on Mastodon. “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.”
As Miles Klee wrote for Rolling Stone when similar bots started to hit the web in 2023, the ersatz historical figures are often wrong about basic biographical details, and show the same bowdlerized unwillingness to grapple with the type of incisive questions that real students might pose about difficult topics.
Needless to say, school administrators who’ve thrown caution to the wind to deploy this type of software are failing to ask important questions, from the practical to the philosophical: what does it mean to interact with a chatbot based on Anne Frank, how will it affect the education of actual kids, and what level of control do educators, administrators and state regulators have over the kind of content these things pump out? And above all, how did anyone think this was in good taste?
More on AI in classrooms: University Enrolling AI-Powered “Students” Who Will Turn in Assignments, Participate in Class Discussions