New and old knowledges: First Peoples’ health and AI
Perspectives & Insights
SESSION RECORDING
This session explored the intersection of Indigenous health and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and highlighted a real-life example of its positives, such as Kyle Turner’s app Pearlii, in the way it has been able to increase access to healthcare where coverage may be inadequate. It also recognised the well-documented dangers of AI and our collective tension with its emerging use in all fields, including health. AI is already being used to generate assumptions about the health of Indigenous and First Peoples, but due its own limitations, it cannot be relied on to accurately represent or draw the correct conclusions because the people who are encoding it are not representative and embed their own assumptions and biases into these programs. The general consensus of the panel, in line with international consensus, was that we urgently need to design effective regulatory and governance frameworks for AI. With respect to indigenous health, we need to incorporate old ways and values systems and change our relationship with data, building our own data system to protect data from capitalist mining and create our own language models to minimise the biases being encoded into generative AI today.
SESSION SUMMARY
Karen Adams
Director, Gukwonderuk - Indigenous Health, Monash University, Australia
SESSION MODERATOR
Tui Raven
Senior Manager, Indigenous Programs, Office of the University Librarian, Deakin University, Australia
Kyle Turner
Founder & CEO, Pearlii, Australia
Papaarangi Reid
Deputy Dean Māori & Head of Department, Te Kupenga Hauora Māori, University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
INVITED SPEAKERS
We gratefully acknowledge the following organisations for providing travel and accommodation support for international speakers in this session.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS