Article by Soumi Banerjee: “Artificial intelligence (AI) has made global movements, testimonies, and critiques seem just a swipe away. The digital realm, powered by machine learning and algorithmic recommendation systems, offers an abundance of visual, textual, and auditory information. With a few swipes or keystrokes, the unbounded world lies open before us. Yet this ‘openness’ conceals a fundamental paradox: the distinction between availability and accessibility.
What is technically available is not always epistemically accessible. What appears global is often algorithmically curated. And what is served to users under the guise of choice frequently reflects the imperatives of engagement, profit, and emotional resonance over critical understanding or cognitive expansion.
The transformative potential of AI in democratising access to information comes with risks. Algorithmic enclosure and content curation can deepen epistemic inequality, particularly for the youth, whose digital fluency often masks a lack of epistemic literacy. What we need is algorithmic transparency, civic education in media literacy, and inclusive knowledge formats…(More)”.
