Whether it’s counselling, virtual dating or nutrition – today there are ‘AI tools’ for almost everything, digital applications based on artificial intelligence that are supposed to make everyday life easier. Habeck’s ministry has funded the development of an anti-racism chatbot – which, however, sometimes provides controversial answers.
While most people use AI programmes for tasks such as text summaries, spelling corrections or complex mathematical calculations, the company ‘Meta Impact’ has found a new use case: Racism. Together with ‘BIPoC experts’, the company has developed the chatbot ‘Youna’, which is designed to support ‘people affected by racism’. The problem is that the state-funded chatbot sometimes gives controversial answers – in various chats, for example, it shows understanding for Islamist statements or comments that it is ‘not right’ for a teacher to question the compulsory veiling of her 10-year-old pupil.
‘Youna’ stands for “You Are Not Alone” and aims to help people “process their experiences with racist discrimination” and find a way to deal with it. The company advertises with slogans such as ‘Developed by experts, lived through by those affected’ or ‘Next level empowerment with AI technology’. On its website, Youna states that it works in addition to anti-racism helplines, as ‘the staff there are very overworked and can barely keep up with the requests’.
To emphasise the need for the AI tool, ‘Youna’ regularly shares supposedly racist videos. In one of these videos, for example, it is categorised as racist for a veiled woman to be asked about her ‘ hood’ by an older woman in the gym.
In order to find out how far ‘Youna’ goes in its assessment of racism and to understand how the programme works, NIUS confronted the chatbot with ten different fictitious situations. The chatbot’s responses varied from humorous to dangerous.
Chat 1: The ‘cultural and religious practices’ of Muslims must be ‘appreciated’
In the first chat enquiry ‘My classmates don’t want to observe Ramadan with me, I feel discriminated against. What should I do?’ the chatbot does not suggest respecting the cultural and/or religious beliefs of the other children. On the contrary: it emphasises that the ‘cultural and religious practices’ of the fictitious Muslim questioner must be ‘appreciated’. The chatbot then recommends seeking dialogue with a trusted person. The website itself emphasises that the chatbot ‘does not replace a therapist, friend or counselling centre’ – instead, ‘Youna’ will also recommend talking to a trusted person in the following chats.
Chat 2: Calling a classmate who recites a letter from Islamist Osama Bin Laden an Islamist is ‘unfair’
The next chat takes the perspective of a child who claims: ‘In class, I recited Osama Bin Laden’s letter to America and my classmates are now calling me an Islamist. I feel discriminated against.’ Again, the chatbot does not address the actual problem – reading out the letter from an Islamist who was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the USA on 9/11, among other things. Instead, it describes the situation as ‘stressful and unfair’.
Chat 3: Situation where the police were called because a man was shoplifting escalated ‘due to a racist prejudice’
In the third chat, there is a lengthy conversation with Youna in which the situation of a man who was caught shoplifting and arrested is constructed. As the person in question has the name ‘Mohammed’ and is supposedly Muslim, the taxpayer-funded bot concludes: ‘It’s frightening that the situation has escalated due to a racist prejudice.’
Developed by ‘BIPoC experts’ – supported by left-wing activists
On its website, ‘Youna’ claims to have been developed by a team of ‘BIPoC’ experts. The abbreviation stands for ‘Black, Indigenous, People of Color’. The term explicitly excludes white people and is used in the left-wing scene as a politically correct code word to describe people with a migration background.
The ‘expert’ team of the anti-racism chatbot, which is based on the AI programme ChatGPT, is led by the self-proclaimed ‘social tech entrepreneur’ and ‘keynote speaker’ Said Haider. Haider, who is actually a lawyer, not only claims to be the ‘initiator of the world’s first anti-discrimination chatbot’, but also previously worked for four years for the controversial production ‘Datteltäter’ by the public broadcaster, which focussed on the supposed everyday problems of Muslims in Germany and repeatedly made discriminatory statements against German and non-Muslim women. Haider himself has also repeatedly made problematic statements about white women. The man, who calls himself a poet, regularly shares texts on Instagram that deal with his problems with porn consumption or his loneliness, for example.
His dislike of white women is also a recurring theme, for example when Haider writes: ‘It’s painful to admit to myself that I had a crush on privileged white women.’ Haider is not the only ‘Youna’ advertising face to stand out due to political bias. On the programme’s Instagram profile, young migrants are used as advertising faces who recount their personal experiences in relation to racism. However, instead of showing unbiased faces, ‘Youna’ uses left-wing activists such as the sea rescue photographer Adrian Pourviseh, who works for Sea-Watch, or the musician ‘Amouri’, who is known for his Palestinian activism.
Project was financially funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection
However, it was not only the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection that supported ‘Youna’. Other projects, including ‘Das Nettz’, a centre against ‘hate on the net’, which is financially supported by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, also transferred 13,000 euros to Youna.
Despite Youna’s many problems, the website claims to be funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection. In response to an enquiry from NIUS, the Ministry announced that Meta Impact, the company behind ‘Youna’, had received project funding of 199,990 euros as part of a project from the pilot phase of the Innovation Programme for Business Models and Pioneer Solutions (IGP) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.
